We argue that modeling the cross-country distribution of per capita income as a mixture distribution provides a natural framework for the detection of convergence clubs. The framework yields tests for the number of component distributions that are likely to be more informative than "bump...

By using nonparametric methods, this paper estimates the distribution of both household and size-adjusted real income in Italy between 1987–1998. Because of data sparseness in the distribution, an adaptive bandwidth is used, while to account for sample design a weighting variable is...

The European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) is the main source of information about poverty and economic inequality in the member states of the European Union. The sample sizes of its annual national surveys are sufficient for reliable estimation at the national level...

The European Union Survey on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) is the main source of information about living standards and poverty in the member states of the European Union. It provides reliable statistics at national level but sample sizes do not allow reliable estimates at sub-national...

Poverty measurement and the analysis of the progress (or otherwise) of the poor is beset with difficulties and controversies surrounding the definition of a poverty line or frontier. Here, using ideas from the partial identification literature and mixture models, a new approach to poverty...

Classifying agents into subgroups in order to measure the plight of the "poor", "middle class" or "rich" is common place in economics, unfortunately the definition of class boundaries is contentious and beset with problems. Here a technique based on mixture models is proposed for surmounting...