We re-examine some of the standard axioms used in the literature on Poverty Measurement. Using a sample of 486 students from Australia, Israel and the USA we investigate the extent to which perceptions of poverty correspond to the axioms.

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

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 "flavours" or interpretations of the basic distributional problem. The flavours include inequality, risk, social welfare...

Using a newly available comprehensive micro-data set we examine changes in the shape of the Brazilian income distribution during the "lost decade" of the 1980s. We adopt alternative parametric and non-parametric approaches to modelling the distribution. We show that inequality changed...

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...

The techniques of simple random sampling are seldom appropriate in the empirical analysis of income distributions. Various types of weighting schemes are usually required either from the point of view of welfare-economic considerations (the mapping of household/family distributions into...

This paper documents the impact of Argentina's recent economic crises on different aspects of poverty, with a special focus on the economic collapse of 2002. We discuss the methodology of poverty measurement in Argentina and we use a simple rule to compensate for the lack of regional poverty...

Drawing on recent work concerning the statistical robustness of inequality statistics we examine the sensitivity of poverty indices to data contamination using the concept of the influence function. We show that poverty and inequality indices have fundamentally different robustness properties,...

We show how classic source-decomposition and subgroup-decomposition methodscan be reconciled with regression methodology used in the recent literature. We alsohighlight some pitfalls that arise from uncritical use of the regression approach. TheLIS database is used to compare the approaches...

It is known from the literature on uncertainty that in cases where individuals express a preference for a high win-probability bet over a bet with high winnings they nevertheless will bid more to obtain the bet with high winnings. We investigate whether a similar phenomenon applies in the...