When is one distribution (of income, consumption, or some other economic variable) more equal or better than another? This question has proven difficult to answer in situations where distribution functions intersect and no unambiguous ranking can be attained without introducing weaker criteria...

Do market-orientated economies with relatively large cross-sectional levels of inequality have higher income mobility and therefore less permanent inequality? To answer this question, we introduce a formal representation of income mobility as an equalizer of permanent income. The proposed...

This thesis consists of three empirical chapters related to distributional outcomes, such as poverty and inequality, in three different contexts.Chapter 1 outlines a class of statistical procedures that permit testing of a broad range of multidimensional stochastic dominance hypotheses. We apply...

This paper characterizes the trade-off between the income gains and the inequality costs of trade using survey data for 54 developing countries. Tariff data on agricultural and manufacturing goods are combined with household survey data on detailed income and expenditure patterns to estimate the...

We examine individuals’ distributional orderings in a number of contexts. This is done by using a questionnaire-experiment that is presented to respondents in any one of seven “flavors” or interpretations of the basic distributional problem. The flavors include inequality, risk, social...

This paper presents two ‘non-welfarist’ approaches and one ‘welfarist’ approach to decompose changes in inequality and social welfare into three components: population, tax policy and labour supply effects. As an illustration, changes in inequality and in values of a social welfare...

This article provides a brief overview of the key issues in inequality measurement and has been prepared for inclusion in the second edition of The New Palgrave.