Distributions of many variables of interest in developed economic and financial markets, including income and wealth, exhibit heavy tails as in the case of Pareto or power laws. Many commonly used income and wealth inequality measures are very sensitive to extremes and outliers generated by...

This paper addresses the problem of the normative evaluation of income tax systems and income tax reforms. While most of the existing criteria, framed in the utilitarian tradition, are uniquely based on information about individual incomes, this paper, building upon the opportunity egalitarian...

Significant deterioration in health and income inequality in Ukraine as well as in other CIS countries during the early transition motivated us to investigate the relationship between the two categories. Based on both macro- and micro-data analysis we focused on how different aspects of health...

Empirical analyses on inequality measurement and those in other fields in economics and finance often face the difficulty that the data is correlated, heterogeneous or heavy-tailed in some unknown fashion. The paper focuses on analogues and modifications of the recently developed t-statistic...

A new database for the calculation of quarterly income inequality measures was established for 11 economies from Central, East and Southeast Europe for the period of 1st quarter 2000 to 4th quarter 2011. Based on the large panel of the acquired quarterly Gini coefficients an ‘Acemoglu-style'...

In the analysis short- and medium term effects of the crisis on household income levels by deciles and on overall inequality and poverty measures are described for the period 2008 to 2011 for Bulgaria and Romania. For the subsequent period of 2011 to 2015 we apply household stress tests. Both...

The systems of direct taxes and cash benefits in the Member States of the European Union vary considerably in size and structure. We explore their direct impacts on cross-sectional income inequality (termed “redistributive effect” for the purpose of this paper) using EUROMOD, a tax-benefit...

This paper reports an exercise to validate EUROMOD output for 2001 by comparing income statistics calculated from the baseline micro-output with comparable statistics from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP). It focuses particularly on some of the income-based common “Laeken”...

This paper reports an exercise to validate EUROMOD output for 1998 by comparing income statistics calculated from the baseline micro-output with comparable statistics from other sources, including the European Community Household Panel. The main potential reasons for discrepancies are...