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 examine the sensitivity of estimates and inequality indices to extreme values, in the sense of their robustness properties and of their statistical performance. We establish that these measures are very sensitive to the properties of the income distribution. Estimation and inference can be...

In this paper we examine the concept of quot;vulnerabilityquot; (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...

In this paper we examine the concept of quot;vulnerabilityquot; within the context of incomemobility of the poor. We test for the dynamics of vulnerable households in the UKusing Waves 1 - 12 of the British Household Panel Study and find that, of threedifferent types of risks that we test for,...

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...

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...

Modelling Lorenz curves (LC) for stochastic dominance comparisons is central to the analysis of income distribution. It is conventional to use non-parametric statistics based on empirical income cumulants which are in the construction of LC and other related second-order dominance criteria....

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