We consider the class of heavy-tailed income distributions and show that the shape of the income distribution has a strong effect on inference for inequality measures. In particular, we demonstrate how the severity of the inference problem responds to the exact nature of the right tail of the...

Finite sample distributions of studentized inequality measures differ substantially from their asymptotic normal distribution in terms of location and skewness. We study these aspects formally by deriving the second-order expansion of the first and third cumulant of the studentized inequality...