A correlation curve is introduced as a tool to study the degree of intergenerational income mobility, i.e. how income status is related between parents and adult child. The method overcomes the shortcomings of the elasticity of children's income with respect to parents' income (i.e. its...

We propose an instrument to measure individuals' social preferences regarding equity and efficiency behind a veil of ignorance. We pair portfolio and wealth distribution choice problems which have a common budget set. For a given bundle, the distribution over an individual's wealth is the same...

A correlation curve is introduced as a tool to study the degree of intergenerational income mobility, i.e. how income status is related between parents and adult child. The method overcomes the shortcomings of the elasticity of children's income with respect to parents' income (i.e. its...

A major aim of most income distribution studies is to make comparisons of income inequality across time for a given country and/or compare and rank different countries according to the level of income inequality. However, most of these studies lack information on sampling errors, which makes it...

We consider concepts and models that are useful for measuring how strongly the distribution of a positive response Y is concentrated near a value with a focus on how concentration varies as a function of covariates. We combine ideas from statistics, economics and reliability theory. Lorenz...

Taxes on housing consumption have attractive features. They can enhance overall efficiency, function as automatic stabilizers, and work progressively. Implementation, however, requires a careful balance between economic ambition and political reality. This article suggests a 5-stage procedure:...

We analyze Engel curves for nuclear households in rural China. The sample includes more than 5000 nuclear families covering nineteen out of thirty Chinese provinces. We consider expenditures on food, also subdivided into several food subcategories such as cereals, or meat and fish, and other...

We examine the dynamic evolution of incomes, both disposable and gross, for several groups in the PSID panel data at several points from 1968 to 1997. We employ the extended Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests of First and Second Order Stochastic Dominance (SD) as implemented by Maasoumi and Heshmati...

Equality of opportunity is an ethical goal with almost universal appeal. The interpretation taken here is that a society has achieved equality of opportunity if it is the case that what individuals accomplish, with respect to some desirable objective, is determined wholly by their choices and...

Empirical analyses on inequality measurement and those in other fields in economics and finance often face the difficulty that the data is correlated, heterogeneous or heavy-tailed in some unknown fashion. The paper focuses on analogues and modifications of the recently developed t-statistic...