Theil’s approach to the measurement of inequality is set in the context of subsequent developments over recent decades. It is shown that Theil’s initial insight leads naturally to a very general class of decomposable inequality measures. It is thus closely related to a number of other...

The European Union Survey on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) is the main source of information about living standards and poverty in the member states of the European Union. It provides reliable statistics at national level but sample sizes do not allow reliable estimates at sub-national...

This paper examines the relationship between inequality and happiness through the lens of heterogeneous values, beliefs and inclinations. Drawing upon opinion data from the European Social Survey for twenty-three countries, we find that individual views on a wide range of themes can be...

This paper delivers new insights into the development of income inequality and regional stratification in Germany after unification using a new method for detecting social stratification by a decomposition of the GINI index which yields the obligatory between- and within-group components as well...

This paper introduces a class of intermediate inequality indices, I(?, ?), that is at the same time ray-invariant and unit-consistent. These measures permit us to keep some of the good properties of Krtscha’s (1994) index while keeping the same “centrist” attitude whatever the income...

From 1992 to 2001, despite its rapid economic growth during the early 1990s, Argentina experienced a period characterized by increasing income inequality and poverty. An axiomatically modified Datt-Ravallion decomposition, that separates changes in poverty rates into mean and inequality...

This paper proposes a partial equality-of-opportunity ordering based on the inequality-of-opportunity curve, a mechanism that gives preference to those who are worse in terms of opportunity. Moreover, it provides a complete ordering that depends on a sensitivity parameter representing the degree...

We evaluate the impact of affiliation to Fair Trade on a sample of Chilean honey producers. Evidence from standard regressions and propensity score matching shows that affiliated farmers have higher productivity (income from honey per worked hour) than the control sample. We show that the...

We provide a systematic treatment of the notion of economic insecurity, assuming that an individual’s sentiment of insecurity depends on the current wealth level and its variations experienced in the past. We think of wealth as a comprehensive variable encompassing anything that may help in...