This study proposes the mode-based decomposition approach to better examine the change of the more impoverished population's wealth into growth and distribution effects. Given Gibrat’s law, the decomposition first approximates the income distribution to lognormal distribution using the maximum...

This paper discusses the measurement of ex-ante inequality of opportunity for binary outcome variables. We argue that the use of scale but not translation invariant inequality measures such as the dissimilarity index might be problematic depending on the aim of the study. The main concern is...

This paper introduces in statistics the notion of the barycenter of the distribution of a non-negative random variable Y with a positive finite mean μY and the quantile function Q(x). The barycenter is denoted by μX and defined as the expected value of the random variable X having the...

Recentered influence functions (RIFs) are statistical tools popularized by Firpo, Fortin, and Lemieux (2009) for analyzing unconditional partial effects on quantiles in a regression analysis framework (unconditional quantile regressions). The flexibility and simplicity of these tools has opened...

Program evaluations often focus on average treatment effects. However, average treatment effects miss important aspects of policy evaluation, such as the impact on inequality and whether treatment harms some individuals. A growing literature develops methods to evaluate such issues by examining...

The Gini index is the most commonly used measure of income inequality. Like any single summary measure of a set of data it cannot capture all aspects that are of interest to researchers. One of its widely reported flaws is that it is supposed to be overly sensitive to changes in the middle of...

In the machine learning community, the Gini index is a very popular score for model selection, and it is also used in actuarial science for evaluating insurance pricing models. The purpose of this tutorial is to discuss the Gini index, both its version in economics and its version in machine...

We provide new estimates of intergenerational income mobility in France for children born in the 1970s using rich administrative data. Since parents’ incomes are not observed, we employ a two-sample two-stage least squares estimation. Our results show that France is characterized by a strong...

Previous research on prices of job amenities has suffered from simultaneity bias due to workers' unobserved offer sets, resulting in “wrong-signed” compensating wage differentials. I propose a new estimator for amenity prices that uses only a single imprecise proxy for workers' offer sets to...

This paper introduces in statistics the notion of the barycenter of the distribution of a non-negative random variable and explores its relation with the Gini index, the concentration area, and the Gini’s mean difference. The introduction of the barycenter allows for new economic, geometrical,...