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 measures are powerful tools of applied welfare analysis. However, to use the tools effectively one has to take into account the characteristics of the data with which one usually has to work. These raise a number of common statistical problems which are addressed here for both...