Drawing on recent work concerning the statistical robustness of inequality statistics we examine the sensitivity of poverty indices to data contamination using the concept of the influence function. We show that poverty and inequality indices have fundamentally different robustness properties,...

Distributional dominance criteria are commonly applied to draw welfare inferences about comparisons, but conclusions drawn from empirical implementations of dominance criteria may be influenced by data contamination. We examine a non-parametric approach to refining Lorenz-type comparisons and...

Modelling Lorenz curves (LC) for stochastic dominance comparisons is central to the analysis of income distribution. It is conventional to use non-parametric statistics based on empirical income cumulants which are in the construction of LC and other related second-order dominance criteria....

Lorenz curves and associated tools for ranking income distributions are commonly estimated on the assumption that full, unbiased samples are available. However, it is common to find income and wealth distributions that are routinely censored or trimmed. We derive the sampling distribution for a...

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...

Lorenz curves and second-order dominance criteria are known to be sensitive to data contamination in the right tail of the distribution. We propose two ways of dealing with the problem: (1) Estimate Lorenz curves using parametric models for income distributions, and (2) Combine empirical...

The economic analysis of income distribution and related topics makes extensive use of dominance criteria to draw inferences about welfare comparisons. However it is possible that - just as some inequality statistics can be very sensitive to extreme values - conclusions drawn from empirical...

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.

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

Statistical problems in modelling personal income distributions include estimation procedures, testing and model choice. Typically, the parameters of a given model are estimated by classical procedures such as maximum likelihood and least squares estimators. Unfortunately, the classical methods...