We address a puzzle in welfare economics - the possibility that rational people may be simultaneously against two apparently con‡icting forms of "tyranny." In fact the two types of tyranny can be reconciled but at the possible cost of con‡ict with other standard welfare principles. We...

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...

The analysis of inequality is placed in the context of recent developments in economics and statistics. Prepated for Handbook of Income Distribution, edited by A B Atkinson and F Bourguignon.

Starting from the axiomatisation of polarisation contained in Esteban and Ray (1994)and Chakravarty and Majumdar (2001) we investigate whether people's perceptionsof income polarisation is consistent with the key axioms. This is carried out using aquestionnaire-experimental approach that...

When families reform there are implications for the income distribution through a number of economic mechanisms: income sharing, changes in household need, reweighting the distribution. These changes are distinct from those that generate changes in factor income or transfers and may affect...

We focus on the statics and dynamics of poverty in Spain using income data from the first eight waves of the European Community Household Panel. These data are for the years 1993-2000, a period not sufficiently covered by recent literature. The results confirm the pattern of poverty changes...

I examine the idea of 'the long run' in Piketty (2014) and related works. In contrast to simplistic interpretations of long-run models of income- and wealth-distribution Piketty (2014) draws on a rich economic analysis that models the intra- and inter-generational processes that underlie the...

Acemoglu, Johnson, & Robinson (2002) have claimed that the world income distribution underwent a "Reversal of Fortune" from 1500 to the present, whereby formerly rich countries in what is now the developing world became poor while poor ones grew rich. We question their analysis with regard to...

Choosing between two income distribution models typically involves testing two non-tested hypotheses, that is hypotheses such that one cannot be obtained as a special or limiting case of the other. Cox (1961, 1962) proposed a classical testing procedure based on the comparison of the maximised...

This paper investigates the extent to which certain social characteristics and personal attributes could help explain income inequality in Greece. This analysis is quite revealing for understanding and explaining income idfferences among certain population subgroups with apparent policy...