In this paper we investigate the problem of measuring social mobility when the social status of individuals is given by their rank. In order to sensibly represent the rank mobility of subgroups within a given society, we address the problem in terms of partial permutation matrices which include...

In this paper we review alternative measure of intergenerational mobility, emphasizing the distinction between absolute, relative and ordinal mobility. We then compare the performance of various mobility indices using real data. From Treiman and Ganzeboom (1990) dataset we compare the degree of...

Data from the 2003 OECD-PISA Survey for Italy reveal a striking difference in the relationship between students' competence (as measured by PISA score in Mathematics) and school grades across regions: a competence level granting bare sufficiency in the North yields excellence grades in the...

This paper reports some facts about grading standards across a varied sample of 16 countries participating in the 2003 OCSE-PISA Survey. Our main finding is that in all countries except Ireland and the USA there is conspicuous heterogeneity in standards across schools (Table 3, Figures 1 & 2)....

When an income tax or tax-benefit system is applied to the distribution of personal incomes, three effects on the distribution of peoples' living standards can be discerned. First, people with equal pre-tax living standard may not receive the same or comparable tax treatment, and in consequence...

In this paper we consider the issue of performing statistical inference for Lorenz curve orderings. This involves testing for an ordered relationship in a multivariate context and making comparisons among more than two population distributions. Our approach is to frame the hypotheses of interest...

In this paper we investigate the problem of measuring social mobility when the social status of individuals is given by their rank. In order to sensibly represent the rank mobility of subgroups within a given society, we address the problem in terms of partial permutation matrices which include...

In this note I consider a simple proof of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem (Arrow 1963). I start with the case of three individuals who have preferences on three alternatives. In this special case there are 133=2197 possible combinations of the three individuals' rational preferences. However, by...

This paper presents a unified treatment for the analysis of two-argument utility functions with a random budget constraint. The way in which changes in both additive and multiplicative risk affect optimal choices has been analyzed prov iding intuitive economic explanations to third order...