Specific functional forms are often used in economic models of distributions; goodness-of-fit measures are used to assess whether a functional form is appropriate in the light of real-world data. Standard approaches use a distance criterion based on the EDF, an aggregation of differences in...

This chapter discusses the formal and informal techniques that are commonly used to give quantitative answers in the field of distributional analysis. To this end, it covers subjects including inequality, poverty, and the modeling of income distributions. It also deals with parametric and...

Standard kernel density estimation methods are very often used in practice to estimate density function. It works well in numerous cases. However, it is known not to work so well with skewed, multimodal and heavy-tailed distributions. Such features are usual with income distributions, defined...