Inequality comparisons between countries and over time should take into account problems of data imperfection. We examine the contrasting experience of the UK and spain during the 1980s in terms of the distribution of disposable income. We consider whether the apparent divergence of inequality...

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...

This paper analyses the economic disadvantage experienced by disabled persons of working-age using data from the British Household Panel Survey. We argue that there are three sources of disadvantage among disabled persons: pre-existing disadvantage among those who become disabled (a...

We provide a critique of the methods that have been used to derive measures of income risk and draw attention to the importance of demographic factors as a source of income risk. We also propose new measures of the contribution to total income risk of demographic and labour market factors....

This paper analyses the evolution of inequality and poverty in Brazil during the 1980s, using a large repeated cross-section household survey data set. We calculate standard scalar measures of inequality and poverty, together with decile means and decile shares. We also present percentile...

Using the evidence from the Luxembourg Wealth Study it appears that the distribution of wealth in the UK is considerably less than in Canada, the US or Sweden. But does this result come from an underestimate of inequality among the wealthy and of the wealth differential between the rich and the...

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...

We show how classic source-decomposition and subgroup-decomposition methods can be reconciled with regression methodology used in the recent literature. We also highlight some pitfalls that arise from uncritical use of the regression approach. The LIS database is used to compare the approaches...

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

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 quot;flavoursquot; or interpretations of the basic distributional problem. The flavours include inequality, risk, social...