One of the central issues in welfare economics is the measurement of overall wellbeing and, to this end, the interaction between institutions (polity) and growth is paramount. Individual welfare depends on both economic and political factors but the continuous nature of economic variables...

Aphorisms that “Rising tides raise all boats” or that material advances of the rich eventually “Trickle Down” to the poor are really maxims regarding the nature of stochastic processes that underlay the income paths of groups of individuals. This paper looks at the implications of...

This paper proposes a convenient measure of the degree of distributional overlap, both parametric and nonparametric, useful in measuring the degree of Polarization, Alienation, and Convergence. We show the measure is asymptotically normally distributed, making it amenable to inference in...

An empirical model is developed to estimate the probability of a given tax status based on firm characteristics. A structural switching regression model of the firm’s demand for capital goods is next specified and incorporates expressions for the user cost of capital which account for tax...

A class of tests for first, second, and third order stochastic dominance, together with modifications to the Pearson goodness of fit test are proposed for the nonparametric comparison of income distributions. They are implemented and compared with tests for generalised Lorenz dominance (which is...

Atkinson (1987) proposed stochastic dominance criteria for analysing poverty which, under certain conditions, establish orderings of states for any poverty line and any poverty measure within given class, refocusing debate on the nature of the income distribution of the poor. Employing new...