In this paper we examine the concept of “vulnerability” within the context of incomemobility of the poor. We test for the dynamics of vulnerable households in the UKusing Waves 1 - 12 of the British Household Panel Study and find that, of threedifferent types of risks that we test for,...

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

In this paper we examine the concept of "vulnerability" (Townsend 1994) within thecontext of income mobility of the poor. We test for the dynamics of vulnerablehouseholds in the UK using Waves 1 - 12 of the British Household Panel Survey andfind that, of three different types of risks that we...

We examine the performance of measures of mobility when allowance ismade for the possibility of data contamination. We find that “singlestage”indices – those that are applied directly to a sample from amultivariate income distribution – usually prove to be non-robust in theface of...

We address a puzzle in welfare economics - the possibility that rational people maybe simultaneously against two apparently conflicting forms of “tyranny”. In fact thetwo types of tyranny can be reconciled but at the possible cost of conflict with otherstandard welfare principles. We examine...