Standard income inequality indices can be interpreted as a measure of welfare loss entailed in departures from equality of outcomes, for egalitarian social welfare functions defined on the distribution of outcomes. But such a welfare interpretation has been criticized for a long time on the...

Currently there is a significant discussion in academia and the popular press over the present amount of inequality, the history of inequality and the negative effects on economies of inequality. Typical of this debate was a recent article by Martin Wolf in the Financial Times, (30 Sept 2014,...

Previous estimates of unfair inequality of opportunity (IOp) are only lower bounds because of the unobservability of the full set of endowed circumstances beyond the sphere of individual responsibility. In this paper, we suggest a new estimator based on a fixed effects panel model which...

Previous estimates of unfair inequality of opportunity (IOp) are only lower bounds because of the unobservability of the full set of endowed circumstances beyond the sphere of individual responsibility. In this paper, we suggest a new estimator based on a fixed effects panel model which...

This paper provides the tools and procedures for empirically implementing several dominance criteria for social welfare comparisons and broad income inequality comparisons. Dominance criteria are expressed in terms of vectors of quantile ordinates based on income shares or quantile means....

This paper presents a simple conceptual framework specifically tailored to measure individual perceptions of wage inequality. Using internationally comparable survey data, the empirical part of the paper documents that there is huge variation in inequality perceptions both across and within...

We introduce a skewness-based approach to measure tax progression and demand for redistribution. We provide a political economy foundation for a novel measure of skewness by expressing key properties of the classical model of voting over income redistribution (Meltzer and Richard, 1981) and the...

The paper proposes and applies statistical tests for poverty dominance that check for whether poverty comparisons can be made robustly over ranges of poverty lines and classes of poverty indices. This helps provide both normative and statistical confidence in establishing poverty ranking across...

Green tax reform is unpopular because, typically, the poor are hurt most by the higher prices of carbon-intensive commodities. If revenues from a carbon tax are recycled, it may be feasible to gain popular support for green tax reform. To investigate this, we estimate an EASI demand system from...

Just as the Gini inequality index captures people's relative deprivation [Yitzhaki (1979)], so, we show in this paper, Gini-based progressivity and horizontal inequity indices capture individual perceptions of relative fiscal harshness and ill-fortune. In fact, we find that these links between...