This chapter discusses the formal and informal techniques that are commonly used to give quantitative answers in the field of distributional analysis. To this end, it covers subjects including inequality, poverty, and the modeling of income distributions. It also deals with parametric and...

We focus on the statics and dynamics of poverty in Spain using income data from the first eight waves of the European Community Household Panel. These data are for the years 1993-2000, a period not sufficiently covered by recent literature. The results confirm the pattern of poverty changes...

We examine the role of taxation within a simple model of wealth accumulation transmission from generation to generation. It turns out that the role of bequest taxation may be central to the development of inequality in the long run. Whether it does so depends on the the way that consumption...

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...

The techniques of simple random sampling are seldom appropriate in the empirical analysis of income distributions. Various types of weighting schemes are usually required either from the point of view of welfare-economic considerations (the mapping of household/family distributions into...

The measurement of health inequalities usually involves either estimating the concentration of health outcomes using an income-based measure of status or applying conventional inequalitymeasurement tools to a health variable that is non-continuous or, in many cases, categorical. However, these...

Approaches to measuring health inequalities are often problematic in that they use methods that are inappropriate for categorical data. The approach here focuses on "pure" or univariate health inequality (rather than income-related or bivariate health inequality) and is based on a concept of...

Our new approach to mobility measurement involves separating out the valuation of positions in terms of individual status (using income, social rank, or other criteria) from the issue of movement between positions. The quantification of movement is addressed using a general concept of distance...

Much of the theoretical literature on inequality assumes that the equalisand is a cardinal variable like income or wealth. However, health status is generally measured as a categorical variable expressing a qualitative order. Traditional solutions involve reclassifying the variable by means of...

We study inequality in the distribution of self-assessed health (SAH) in the United States and China, two large countries that have expanded their insurance provisions in recent decades, but that lack universal coverage and differ in other social determinants of health. Using comparable health...