Inequality measures are often used to summarise information about empirical income distributions. However , the resulting picture of the distribution and of the changes in the distribution can be severely distorted if the data are contaminated. The nature of this distortion will in general...

The tax-payer-as-gambler (TAG) model of tax non-compliance is the classic vehicle for providing some simple insights. Under fairly general conditions this model supports the following four propositions: (1) if the rate of return to evasion is positive everyone evades tax; (2) people with higher...

Instead of Inequality analysis sometimes neglects the problem of allowing differences in people's non-income characteristics in the comparison of income distribution, I would say, At the heart of any distributional analysis there is the problem of allowing for differences in people's non-income...

Orderings of income distribution in terms of inequality should be closely related to orderings in terms of risk. Using a novel mult-country questgionnaire experiment we examine the basis for this claim in terms of respondents' distributional perceptions. We show that in terms of both inequality...

Lorenz curves and second-order dominance criteria are known to be sensitive to data contamination in the right tail of the distribution. We propose two ways of dealing with the problem: (1) Estimate Lorenz curves using parametric models for income distributions, and (2) Combine empirical...

In this paper we examine the concept of "vulnerability" (Townsend 1994) within thecontext of income mobility of the poor. We test for the dynamics of vulnerablehouseholds in the UK using Waves 1 - 12 of the British Household Panel Survey andfind that, of three different types of risks that we...

We examine the sensitivity of estimates and inequality indices to extreme values, in the sense of their robustness properties and of their statistical performance. We establish that these measures are very sensitive to the properties of the income distribution. Estimation and inference can be...

Using a simple axiomatic structure we characterise two classes ofinequality indices - absolute and relative - that take into account "envy"in the income distribution. The concept of envy incorporated hereconcerns the distance of each person's income from his or herimmediately richer neighbour....

The 'prediction approach' proposed by Dearden, Machin and Reed (DMR) consists in (1) regressing the observed incomes of the child and parent families on separate sets of predetermined variables, and (2) regressing the child's predicted income on that of the parents. Conceptually, this estimator...

In this paper we examine the concept of "vulnerability" within the context of incomemobility of the poor. We test for the dynamics of vulnerable households in the UKusing Waves 1 - 12 of the British Household Panel Study and find that, of threedifferent types of risks that we test for,...