Inequality measures are often used to summarise information about empirical income distributions. However , the resulting picture of the distribution and of the changes in the distribution can be severely distorted if the data are contaminated. The nature of this distortion will in general...

We show how a collection of results in the literature on the empirical estimation of welfare indicators from sample data can be unified. We also demonstrate how some of these ideas can be extended to empirically important cases where the data have been trimmed or censored.

We investigate a general problem of comparing pairs of distributions which includes approaches to inequality measurement, the evaluation of “unfair” income inequality, evaluation of inequality relative to norm incomes, and goodness of fit. We show how to represent the generic problem simply...

Instead of Inequality analysis sometimes neglects the problem of allowing differences in peopleamp;apos's non-income characteristics in the comparison of income distribution, I would say, At the heart of any distributional analysis there is the problem of allowing for differences in...

We examine the way in which across-the-board additions to incomes are perceived to change inequality. Using a questionnaire we investigate whether subjective inequality rankings correspond to the principle of scale-independence of translation-independence, or to some generalised concept of...

We examine the performance of measures of mobility when allowance is made for the possibility of data contamination. We find that 'single-stage' indices - those that are applied directly to a sample from a multivariate income distribution - usually prove to be non-robust in the face of...