This paper is concerned with the problem of ranking Lorenz curves in situations where the Lorenz curves intersect and no unambiguous ranking can be attained without introducing weaker ranking criteria than first-degree Lorenz dominance. To deal with such situations Aaberge (2009) introduced two...

In this paper we analyze whether and which political institutions are important for famine prevention and for keeping the levels of inequality low. While famines are sudden crises hitting a country, inequality is a structural problem. As a consequence, the institutions needed might be very...

Harsanyi (1955) proved that, in the context of uncertainty, social ratio- nality and the Pareto principle impose severe constraints on the degree of priority for the worst-off that can be adopted in the social evaluation. Since then, the literature has hesitated between an ex ante approach that...

The popular discounted utilitarian criterion for infinite horizon social choice has been criticized on the ground that it treats successive generations unfairly. I propose to evaluate intergenerational welfare with a rank- discounted utilitarian (RDU) criterion instead. The criterion amounts to...

We examine linkages between aggregate household income, distribution of that income, and aggregate cross-country expenditure patterns. We are able to decompose income effects into international income dispersion effects (from variations in average income) and national income dispersion (income...

This paper elaborates the approach to the longitudinal analysis of income-related health inequalities first proposed in Allanson, Gerdtham and Petrie (2010). In particular, the paper establishes the normative basis of their mobility indices by embedding their decomposition of the change in the...

We show in this paper that the growth rate of the Sen index is multi-decomposable, that is, decomposable simultaneously by groups and income sources. The multi-decomposition of the poverty growth yields respectively: the growth rate of the poverty incidence (poverty rate) decomposed by groups,...

In this paper it is argued that subjective well-being of the individual depends on two types of variables. The first type consists of characteristics of the individual himself, such as age, health, income, etc. The second type of variables consists of the characteristics of the individuals...

We reconstruct a dataset used by Persson and Tabellini (AER, 1994) to test the robustness of their finding that inequality reduces income growth, but only in democracies. We find that their result is highly sensitive to the use of data sources on both democracy and inequality. When we substitute...

This paper analizes the links between non-monetary deprivation and inequalities in poverty levels in Europe. Non-monetary deprivation is defined as an enforced lack of a combination of items depicting material living conditions, such as housing conditions, possession of durable goods and...