Firms are usually better informed than tax authorities about market conditions and the potential profits of competitors. They may try to exploit this situation by underreporting their own taxable profits. The tax authority could offset firms' informational advantage by adopting "smarter" audit...

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

We show how classic source-decomposition and subgroup-decomposition methodscan be reconciled with regression methodology used in the recent literature. We alsohighlight some pitfalls that arise from uncritical use of the regression approach. TheLIS database is used to compare the approaches...

We introduce a model of redistributive income taxation and public expenditure. Thisjoint treatment permits analyzing the interdependencies between the two policies: onecannot be chosen independently of the other. Empirical evidence reveals that partisanconfrontation essentially falls on...

Specific functional forms are often used in economic models of distributions; goodness-of-fit measures are used to assess whether a functional form is appropriate in the light of real-world data. Standard approaches use a distance criterion based on the EDF, an aggregation of differences in...

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 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.

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...

In this paper we examine the concept of "vulnerability" (Townsend 1994) within thecontext of income mobility of the poor. We test for the dynamics of vulnerablehouseholds in the UK using Waves 1 - 12 of the British Household Panel Survey andfind that, of three different types of risks that we...

We examine individuals' distributional orderings in a number of contexts. This is done by using a questionnaire-experiment that is presented to respondents in any one of seven "flavours" or interpretations of the basic distributional problem. The flavours include inequality, risk, social welfare...