Inequality measures are often used to summarise information about empirical income distributions. However , the resulting picture of the distribution and of the changes in the distribution can be severely distorted if the data are contaminated. The nature of this distortion will in general...

With income distributions it is common to encounter the problem of missing data. When a parametric model is fitted to the data, the problem can be overcome by specifying the marginal distribution of the observed data. With classical methods of estimation such as the maximum likelihood (ML) an...

We show how a collection of results in the literature on the empirical estimation of welfare indicators from sample data can be unified. We also demonstrate how some of these ideas can be extended to empirically important cases where the data have been trimmed or censored.

Statistical problems in modelling personal income distributions include estimation procedures, testing and model choice. Typically, the parameters of a given model are estimated by classical procedures such as maximum likelihood and least squares estimators. Unfortunately, the classical methods...

An important aspect of income distribution is the modelling of the data using an appropriate parametric model. This involves estimating the parameters of the models, given the data at hand. Income data are typically in grouped form. Moreover, they are not always reliable in that they may contain...

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,...