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...

In this paper we reconsider the Dagum decomposition of the Gini index and we compare this decomposition with the decompositions proposed by Mookherjee and Shorrocks and by Lambert and Aronson. In so doing, a deeper insight into the meaning of the overlapping term is given and an alternative...

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...

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...

In this paper, we propose to use the so-called Sen-Shorrocks poverty index (Shorrocks, 1995) to measure multidimensional deprivation when only dichotomous variables are available to assess deprivation in the various deprivation domains, the most common case in the literature, and introduce a...

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 considers a partitioned population and develops a decomposition of the Gini index in two components, which measure the within and the between groups inequality. Differently from the most widespread inequality measure decompositions, having a between component that compares the means...

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...