Acemoglu, Johnson, & Robinson (2002) have claimed that the world income distribution underwent a Reversal of Fortune from 1500 to the present, whereby formerly rich countries in what is now the developing world became poor while poor ones grew rich. We question their analysis with regard to both...

Using the evidence from the Luxembourg Wealth Study it appears that the distribution of wealth in the UK is considerably less than in Canada, the US or Sweden. But does this result come from an underestimate of inequality among the wealthy and of the wealth differential between the rich and the...

We show how classic source-decomposition and subgroup-decomposition methods can be reconciled with regression methodology used in the recent literature. We also highlight some pitfalls that arise from uncritical use of the regression approach. The LIS database is used to compare the approaches...

We provide, for the class of relative bidimensional inequality indices, adecomposition of inequality into two univariate Atkinson-Kolm-Senindices and a third statistic which depends on the joint distribution ofresources

We examine the relationship between risk analysis and inequality analysis, using a questionnaire-experimental approach .The experiments focus on the effect of income transformations on the perceived rankings of income distributions in either a risk or inequality context. Both context and income...

The amp;apos'prediction approachamp;apos' 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 childamp;apos's predicted income on that of the parents....

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...

Inequality comparisons between countries and over time should take into account problems of data imperfection. We examine the contrasting experience of the UK and spain during the 1980s in terms of the distribution of disposable income. We consider whether the apparent divergence of inequality...