The Pareto distribution is often used in many areas of economics to model the right tail of heavy-tailed distributions. However, the standard method of estimating the shape parameter (the Pareto index) of this distribution– the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) – is non-robust, in the sense...

This paper models income distribution in four Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and the Slovak Republic) in 1990s and 2000s using parametric models of income distribution. In particular, we use the generalized beta distribution of the second kind...

The distribution of impact factors has been modeled in the recent informetric literature using two-exponent law proposed by Mansilla et al. (2007). This paper shows that two distributions widely-used in economics, namely the Dagum and Singh-Maddala models, possess several advantages over the...

Modeling distributions of citations to scientific papers is crucial for understanding how science develops. However, there is a considerable empirical controversy on which statistical model fits the citation distributions best. This paper is concerned with rigorous empirical detection of...

This paper is a follow-up to Marrero and Rodríguez (2012), who estimated the inequality of opportunity (IO) in Europe in 2005. We use the EU-SILC 2005 and 2011 databases to compare the IO in 23 European countries before and after the Great Recession. The parametric procedure of Ferreira and...

We analyse statistical inference for top income shares in finite samples. The asymptotic inference performs poorly even in large samples. The standard bootstrap tests give some improvement, but can be unreliable. Semi-parametric bootstrap approach is accurate in moderate and larger samples.

We use data from the British Household Panel Survey to analyse changes in poverty of self-reported health from 1991 to 2008. Recently introduced ordinal counterparts of the classical Foster, Greer, Thorbecke (1984) (FGT) poverty measures are used to decompose changes in self-reported health...

The coefficient of relative risk aversion (CRRA) is notoriously difficult to estimate. Recently, Barro and Jin (On the size distribution of macroeconomic disasters, Econometrica 2011; 79(3): 434–455) have come up with a new estimation approach that fits a power-law model to the tail of...

Richness indices are distributional statistics used to measure the incomes, earnings, or wealth of the rich. This paper uses a linearization method to derive the sampling variances for recently introduced distributionally-sensitive richness measures when estimated from survey data. The results...

This paper uses several decomposition of poverty and poverty changes to identify factors explaining recent changes in absolute income and consumption poverty in Poland during 1998−2008. Shapley decompositions of poverty changes into growth and redistribution components show that fast economic...