Recent studies attempt to quantify the extent to which income inequality is due to income components, such as earnings, investment income and transfer income. This paper examines the fundamental issues and problems involved in assigning inequality contributions to components. Different...

This paper considers a wide class of inequality indices and identifies those which are additively decomposable. The sub-class of mean independent, additively decomposable measures turns out to be a single parameter family which includes the squared coefficient of variation and the two Theil's...

The theoretical analysis of tax progressivity has proceeded on the unrealistic assumption that tax liability is never zero, thereby precluding a systematic examination of the progressivity effects of such basic tax reforms as an increase in personal allowances. This paper extends the core...

Stochastic dominance and Lorenz dominance are examples of orderings which require unanimous agreement among an infinite set of indices. This paper considers various subsets of inequality measures that respect Lorenz dominance, and assesses the extent to which a small number of indices can...