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...

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...

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...

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...