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 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...

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 measurement involves explicit or implicit value judgements. The subjective approach to inequality measurement is a relatively new and fast-developing area which focueses direct attention on these judgements. It is amp;apos'subjectiveamp;apos' in the sense that it takes accounts of...

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...

We examine the specification and interpretation of the transfer principle in analysing income distributions. The early work by Pigou and Dalton on this topic left open the possibility of a variety of specifications and interpretation of the principle. The modern development of the theory since...

Starting from the axiomatisation of polarisation contained in Esteban and Ray (1994)and Chakravarty and Majumdar (2001) we investigate whether people's perceptionsof income polarisation is consistent with the key axioms. This is carried out using aquestionnaire-experimental approach that...

Specific functional forms are often used in economic models of distributions; goodness-of-fit measures are used to assess whether a functional form is appropriate in the light of real-world data. Standard approaches use a distance criterion based on the EDF, an aggregation of differences in...