This paper is concerned with the problem of ranking Lorenz curves in situations where the Lorenz curves intersect and no unambiguous ranking can be attained without introducing weaker ranking criteria than first-degree Lorenz dominance. To deal with such situations Aaberge (2009) introduced two...

The theoretical literature on inequality of opportunity formulates basic properties that measures of inequality of opportunity should have. Standard methods for the measurement of inequality of opportunity require the construction of counterfactual outcome distributions through statistical...

The question of who benefits from economic growth is usually assessed by using cross section data to calculate changes in income inequality. An alternative is to assess patterns of panel income changes. We derive theoretical conditions reconciling changes in inequality together with various...

Standard income inequality indices can be interpreted as a measure of welfare loss entailed in departures from equality of outcomes, for egalitarian social welfare functions defined on the distribution of outcomes. But such a welfare interpretation has been criticized for a long time on the...

We examine the socially optimal wealth distribution in a two-person two-good model with heterogeneous workers and asymmetric social interactions where only one (social) individual derives positive or negative utility from the leisure of the other (non-social) individual. We show that the...

We show that the choice of the welfare measure has a substantial impact on the degree of welfare-related health inequality. Combining various income and wealth measures with different health measures, we calculate 80 health concentration indices. The influence of the welfare measure is more...

Using four rounds (1999, 2002, 2005, 2008) of the Korean Labor and Income Panel Study (KLIPS), this article examines determinants of household income and consumption levels and inequalities. Unconditional as well as conditional stochastic dominance (SD) tests are performed by year, by household...

Starting from the axiomatisation of polarisation contained in Esteban and Ray (1994) and Chakravarty and Majumdar (2001) we investigate whether people's perceptions of income polarisation is consistent with the key axioms. This is carried out using a questionnaire-experimental approach that...

This paper is concerned with the problem of ranking Lorenz curves in situations where the Lorenz curves intersect and no unambiguous ranking can be attained without introducing weaker ranking criteria than first-degree Lorenz dominance. To deal with such situations two alternative sequences of...