This paper offers a tool box of disaggregative measures of distributional change, including population shares, income shares, quantile mean incomes and relative mean incomes of different income groups. It highlights median-based measures along with quintiles and deciles. It also offers formulas...

This study investigates the question of how much income redistribution individuals desire in a society with random differences in individual incomes. The experiments confronted individuals with choices of lotteries determining their own payoffs--to measure individual risk aversion--and with...

This is a paper in response to the article "An Experimental Test of Preferences for the Distribution of Income and Individual Risk Aversion" by by John Beck (1994). Beck's experimental results on preferences for income distribution and our own findings on distributive justice are compared and...

Theil's T index has attractive decompositional properties exploited by James Galbraith and his team. We provide a different take on using the Theil index. We consider Theil's T from the perspective of variations in income or earnings across the major racial and ethnic groups that comprise a...

This paper provides the tools and procedures for empirically implementing several dominance criteria for social welfare comparisons and broad income inequality comparisons. Dominance criteria are expressed in terms of vectors of quantile ordinates based on income shares or quantile means....

This paper provides a set of tool box measures for flexibly describing distributional changes and empirically implementing several dominance criteria for social welfare comparisons and broad income inequality comparisons. Dominance criteria are expressed in terms of vectors of quantile...

A model is developed for peasant households in land abundant areas who choose between two technologies for land preparation: a manual one and one using draught animals. For draught a minimum number of animals is required so that a technological non convexity exists. It follows that certain...

In this paper it is argued that subjective well-being of the individual depends on two types of variables. The first type consists of characteristics of the individual himself, such as age, health, income, etc. The second type of variables consists of the characteristics of the individuals...

We ask individuals for their reservation price of a specified lotteryand deduce their Arrow-Pratt measure of risk aversion.This allows direct testing of common hypotheses on risk attitudes inthree datasets. We find that risk aversion indeed fallswith income and wealth. Entrepreneurs are less...

Detecting heterogeneity within a population is crucial in many economic and financial applications. Econometrically, this requires a credible determination of multimodality in a given data distribution. We propose a straightforward yet effective technique for mode inference in discrete data...