According to standard theory founded on Harsanyi (1953, 1955) a social welfare function can be appropriately based on the individual’s approach to choice under uncertainty. We investigate whether people really do rank distributions according to the same principles irrespective of whether the...

We stablish a general relationship between the standard form of the individualistic social-welfare function and the "reduced-form" version that is expressed in terms of inequality and mean income. This shows the relationship between the property of monotonicity and the slope of the...

Lorenz curves and second-order dominance criteria are known to be sensitive to data contamination in the right tail of the distribution. We propose two ways of dealing with the problem: (1) Estimate Lorenz curves using parametric models for income distributions, and (2) Combine empirical...

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

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 in inequality...

Poverty and inequality are often estimated from grouped data as complete household surveys are neither always available to researchers nor easy to analyze. In this study we assess the performance of functional forms proposed by Kakwani (1980a) and Villasenor and Arnold(1989) to estimate the...

This paper examines the link between health inequalities, air pollution and political institutions. In health economics literature, many studies have assessed the association between environmental degradation and health outcomes. This paper extends this literature by investigating how air...

Standardmethoden zur Schätzung von Disparitätsmaßen aus klassierten Daten basieren entweder auf der Bestimmung von Schranken, die den wahren Wert des jeweiligen Disparitätsmaßes einschließen (nichtparametrischer Ansatz) oder aber auf Annahmen bezüglich der den Daten zugrunde liegenden...

This paper develops methodology for nonparametric estimation of a measure of the overlap of two distributions based on kernel estimation techniques. This quantity has been proposed as a measure of economic polarization between two groups, Anderson (2004) and Anderson et al. (2010). In ecology...

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...