mobility measures; robustness; data contamination

The economic analysis of income distribution and related topics makes extensive use of dominance criteria to draw inferences about welfare comparisons. However it is possible that - just as some inequality statistics can be very sensitive to extreme values - conclusions drawn from empirical...

What are the principal issues on which research on income distributionand inequality focus? How might that focus shift in the immediate future?Prepared for the The Elgar Handbook of Socio-Economics.

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.

Inequality comparisons between countries and over time should take into account problems of data imperfection. We examine the contrasting experience of the UK and spain during the 1980s in terms of the distribution of disposable income. We consider whether the apparent divergence of inequality...

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...

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.

The analysis of inequality is placed in the context of recent developments in economics and statistics. Prepated for Handbook of Income Distribution, edited by A B Atkinson and F Bourguignon.