Most inequality and poverty theory analyzes "equivalent income" distributions for homogeneous populations: incomes are assumed to be deflated by an equivalence scale that accounts for differences in needs between households. Yet in practice there is no consensus about what the appropriate...

The authors develop two simple measures of how much inequality is explained by individual population characteristics or groups of characteristics, analogous to R[superscript 2] in regression analysis. The authors investigate the measures' empirical implementation using several alternative...

The authors respond to J. Banks and P. Johnson's (1994) comment on Coulter et al. (1992) drawing on a more general discussion of parametric equivalence scale and scale relativity issues and new empirical results. The authors show that criticisms of their earlier work are unfounded. When the...

The literatures on the assessment of income distributions and on differences in needs are not well integrated. The theoretical literature providing results about evaluations and comparisons of income distributions does not, in the main, consider the implications of non-income differences between...

The authors derive criteria for ranking income distributions where households differ in equity-relevant nonincome characteristics ('needs'), using methods that do not require cardinal specifications of equivalence scales. They consider comparisons for situations where the distributions of needs...

The authors provide evidence about U.K. trends in gender differentials in market work time, domestic work time, and their sum (total work time) between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s. The ratio of women's total work hours to men's total work hours changed little, but for both sexes allocations of...

Trends in real national income are typically assessed using aggregate indicators such as GDP per capita, or mean household income, whereas the income distribution literature focuses on trends in income inequality. By contrast this paper takes an integrated approach to real national income...

What variables should be used as regressors in models of the length of time which people spend doing unpaid domestic work? To most economists, this answer would be straightforward: use the variables which are implied by theoretical model of household time allocation (e.g. Becker's). This paper...