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...

Individual income is determined by free-will actions related to the level of effort exerted and by opportunities determined by aspects beyond the individual's control, such as family background, race, place of birth or health endowments. Taking human capital as the main engine of development, we...

The aim of this paper is twofold: a) To explore the evolution of occupational segregation of women and men of different racial/ethnic groups in the U.S. during the period 1940-2010; and b) to assess the consequences of segregation for each of them. For that purpose, this paper proposes a simple...

The assessment of income inequality can be investigated looking at the solution concepts of the cooperative game theory. We propose a multi-factorial decomposition of the Atkinson index by income sources and evaluate it as a cooperative game of the social cost of inequality. This framework...

This paper analyses the effects of the recent Economic Crisis on individual preferences for redistribution in 23 European countries. After implementing a decomposition of the variation in these preferences, it is showed that the crisis was highly significant in increasing support for...

The interplay of between- and within-country inequality, the relative contribution of each to overall global inequality, and the implications this has for who benefits from recent global growth (and by how much), has become a significant avenue for economic research. Drawing conclusions from...

We axiomatically characterize two classes of poverty measures which are sensitive to inequality of opportunity - one a strict subset of the other. The proposed indices are sensitive not only to income shortfalls from the poverty line, but also to differences in opportunities faced by people with...

The ``Palma'' is the ratio of national income shares of the top 10 percent of households to the bottom 40 percent, reflecting Gabriel Palma's observation of the stability of the ``middle'' 50 percent share of income across countries so that distribution is largely a question of the tails. In...