We develop a GMM procedure for estimating income distributions from grouped data with unknown group bounds. The approach enables us to obtain standard errors for the estimated parameters and functions of the parameters, such as inequality and poverty measures, and to test the validity of an...

Data for measuring poverty and income inequality are frequently available in a summary form that describes the proportion of income or expenditure for each of a number of population proportions. While various discrete measures can be applied directly to data in this limited form, these discrete...

The (double) Pareto-lognormal is an emerging parametric distribution for income that has a sound underlying generating process, good theoretical properties, and favourable evidence of its fit to data. We extend existing results for this distribution in 3 directions. We derive closed form formula...

The conventional formula for estimating the extended Gini coefficient is a covariance formula provided by Lerman and Yitzhaki (1989). We suggest an alternative estimator obtained by approximating the Lorenz curve by a series of linear segments. In a Monte Carlo experiment designed to assess the...

This paper explores sample size requirements for the estimation of SUR models by (two-stage) feasible generalized least squares, maximum likelihood and Bayesian methods. It is found that the sample size requirements presented in standard treatments of SUR models are incomplete and potentially...

The nature of global and regional income distributions and the extent of inequality are examined using country-level data on income distributions drawn from World Bank studies and the World Institute for Development Economics Research for the period 1993 - 2000. Beta-2 income distributions are...

A major problem encountered in studies of income inequality at regional and global levels is the estimation of income distributions from data that are in a summary form. In this paper we estimate national and regional income distributions within a general framework that relaxes the assumption of...

The use of principal component techniques to estimate approximate factor models with large cross-sectional dimension is now well established. However, recent work by Inklaar, Jacobs and Romp (2003) and Boivin and Ng (2005) has cast some doubt on the importance of a large cross-sectional...

Time of day (TOD) rates are a commonly used method for peak load pricing of many services. Such services as ; electricity, communications, transportation, shared computer facilities, and computer networks (ie. the Internet), either use, or will use form of TOD pricing. The model presented here...

The Lorenz curve relates the cumulative proportion of income to the cumulative proportion of population. When a particular functional form of the Lorenz curve is specified it is typically estimated by linear or nonlinear least squares, estimation techniques that have good properties when the...