We show that a recent appendix to the Gini-coefficient to make the latter more sensitive to asymmetric income distributions can be viewed as an abstract measure of skewness. We develop some of its properties and apply it to the US-income distribution in 1974 and 2010

The interest in the level of global inequality has surged in recent years. This paper complements existing estimates of global inequality by providing the first estimates of the level of bipolarization of the global income distribution. During 1975–2010, global bipolarization declined...

This study contributes to the literature on inequality of opportunity (IOp) in China by covering a longer and more recent span of time, employing better measures of given characteristics, and analyzing IOp for household income per capita with comparisons to individual income. Furthermore, we...

The Gini coefficient features prominently in Amartya Sen's 1973 and 1997 seminal work on income inequality and social welfare. We construct the Gini coefficient from social-psychological building blocks, reformulating it as a ratio between a measure of social stress and aggregate income. We...

This study investigates whether the Federal Reserve (Fed) should care about inequality. We develop a Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian (HANK) model, which generates empirically realistic inequalities and business cycle properties observed in the U.S. data. Households in the model economy are...

This paper defines and characterizes the concept of an increase in inverse downside inequality and show that, when the Lorenz curves of two income distributions intersect, how the change from one distribution to the other is judged by an inequality index exhibiting inverse downside inequality...

This paper introduces in statistics the notion of the barycenter of the distribution of a non-negative random variable Y with a positive finite mean μY and the quantile function Q(x). The barycenter is denoted by μX and defined as the expected value of the random variable X having the...

The standard approach to inequality measurement regards all inequalities as being unfair. However, most people do not share this view, and believe that some inequalities are fair. This paper shows one way of generalizing the standard approach to take account of the distinction between fair and...

Using the Standardized World Income Inequality Database, we examine if the KOF Index of Globalization and the Economic Freedom Index of the Fraser institute are related to within- country income inequality using panel data covering around 80 countries 1970-2005. Freedom to trade internationally...

The Gini coefficient features prominently in Amartya Sen's 1973 and 1997 seminal work on income inequality and social welfare. We construct the Gini coefficient from socialpsychological building blocks, reformulating it as a ratio between a measure of social stress and aggregate income. We...