Starting from a simple, descriptive model of individual income, an explicit link between the age composition of a population and the personal distribution of incomes is established. Demographic effects on income inequality are derived. Next, a pay-as-you-go financed state pension system is...

According to the catastrophic health expenditure methodology a household is in catastrophe if its health out-of-pocket budget share exceeds a critical threshold. We develop a conceptual framework for addressing three questions in relation to this methodology, namely: 1. Can a budget share be...

We provide a parsimonious axiomatisation of the complete class of absolute nequality indices. Our approach uses only a weak form of decomposability and does not require a priori that the measures be differentiable

This paper argues that the governmental decisions on corporate tax and public capital stock are not independent. In order to explain this relationship, we have built a general equilibrium model of corporate tax competition where governments supply public capital and compete for corporate...

We use the delta method to derive the large sample distribution of multidimensional inequality indices. We also present a simple method for computing standard errors and obtain explicit formulas in the context of two families of indices

Inequality measures are often used to summarise information about empirical income distributions. However, the resulting picture of the distribution and of the changes in the distribution can be severely distorted if the data are contaminated. The nature of this distortion will in general depend...

We examine the way in which across-the-board additions to incomes are perceived to change inequality. Using a questionnaire we investigate whether subjective inequality rankings correspond to the principle of scale-independence of translation-independence, or to some generalised concept of...

An extensive micro data set matching firms, establishments and their employees, is used to study the determinants of earnings inequality in Portugal and its evolution from 1983 to 1992, with the Theil index, its decomposition, and the decomposition of its change as tools of analysis. A profile...

This paper presents a robust estimation of two income distribution models using Spanish data for the period 1990-91 under three different concepts of income. The effect on the estimates of the Theil index due to the choice of the definition of income and of the estimation method is also analysed

Using a newly available comprehensive micro-data set we examine changes in the shape of the Brazilian income distribution during the quot;lost decadequot; of the 1980s. We adopt alternative parametric and non-parametric approaches to modelling the distribution. We show that inequality changed...