The key challenge in making distributional comparisons with ordinal data is the lack of commensurability of the distances between the ordered categories. This chapter provides a critical review of the most recent theoretical developments addressing this challenge and providing methods for...

The Gini coefficient features prominently in Amartya Sen’s 1973 and 1997 seminal work on income inequality and social welfare. We construct the Gini coefficient from social-psychological building blocks, reformulating it as a ratio between a measure of social stress and aggregate income. We...

Assessing whether distributional changes are pro-poor has become increasingly widespread in academic and policy circles. Starting from relatively general ethical axioms, this paper proposes simple graphical methods to test whether distributional changes are indeed pro-poor. Pro-poor standards...

This note is motivated by recent arguments made by Martin Feldstein in which the relevance of inequality is dismissed (if everybody's income goes up, who cares if inequality is up too?), and the argument is made that only poverty alleviation should matter. This note shows that we all do care...

The Gini coefficient features prominently in Amartya Sen's 1973 and 1997 seminal work on income inequality and social welfare. We construct the Gini coefficient from socialpsychological building blocks, reformulating it as a ratio between a measure of social stress and aggregate income. We...

This paper extends the previous literature on the ethical links between the measurement of poverty, social welfare and inequality. We show inter alia, how, when the range of possible poverty lines is unbounded above, a robust ranking of absolute poverty may be interpreted as a robust ranking of...

While inequality in resource endowments has been shown to affect cooperation levels in groups, much of this evidence comes from studies of within-group inequality. In an online public goods experiment, we instead examine the effects of payoff-irrelevant inequality in resources between groups on...

The authors introduce a simple model of public preferences on poverty assistance. Their focus is on the roles played by the socioeconomic status of a potential welfare recipient and the stereotypes about his/her ethnic group in shaping taxpayers' preferences on appropriate assistance. The model...

Received migration research has it that higher relative deprivation strengthens the incentive for people to migrate, and that migration is often a risky enterprise. Relative deprivation has been seen as a push factor in migration, and the level of risk involved in migration has been understood...

Each year, more than two million U.S. households have an eviction case filed against them. Many cities have recently implemented policies aimed at reducing the number of evictions, motivated by research showing strong associations between being evicted and subsequent adverse economic outcomes....