The Easterlin Paradox refers to the fact that happiness data are typically stationary in spite of considerable increases in income. This amounts to a rejection of the hypothesis that current income is the only argument in the utility function. One possible answer is that human development...

This paper examines the relationship between inequality and happiness through the lens of heterogeneous values, beliefs and inclinations. Drawing upon opinion data from the European Social Survey for twenty-three countries, we find that individual views on a wide range of themes can be...

The key challenge in making distributional comparisons with ordinal data is the lack of commensurability of the distances between the ordered categories. This chapter provides a critical review of the most recent theoretical developments addressing this challenge and providing methods for...

Income distribution has been a longstanding focus of social and economic interest, but never more so than in recent times. New metrics for disadvantage and spread enable a more precise differentiation of directional asymmetry and dispersion, drawing on an internal contextual perspective. The...

We study inequality in a context of more than one variable. We show an alternative ordering between matrices representing individuals endowed with several commodities. Then, we represent such an ordering by using convexity and polyhedral theory

Using the Big Mac Index, we offer a simple measure to study the real income inequali-ty. We provide a multidimensional real income inequality analysis by exploring the Coefficient of Variation and the Big Mac Affordability of households across all in-come deciles of 28 countries for years 2000...