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 two alternative sequences of...

Social scientists study two kinds of inequality: inequality between persons (as in income inequality) and inequality between subgroups (as in racial inequality). This paper analyzes the mathematical connections between the two kinds of inequality. The paper proceeds by exploring a set of...

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...

Redistribution schemes (taxes or benefits) are generally performed at the household level. The issue is to know whether intra-household inequality magnifies or hampers the redistributive effect of the transfers, when the policy-maker focuses on the inequality at the individual level. Depending...

Over the last 100 years, a large number of distributions has been proposed for the modeling of size phenomena, notably the size distribution of personal incomes. The most widely known of these models are the Pareto, log-normal, generalized log-normal, generalized Gamma, generalized Beta of the...

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 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...

This paper illustrates how Lorenz Curves can be used to identify the best income distribution on social welfare grounds, within a set of alternative income distributions generated by different policy options. After highlighting some drawbacks of using specific functional forms of the Social...

This paper surveys selected applications of the Lorenz curve and related stochasticorders in economics and econometrics, with a bias towards problems in statisticaldistribution theory. These include characterizations of income distributions in termsof families of inequality measures, Lorenz...