An income distribution is a mixture of two given income distributions if the relative frequency it associates with each income level is a convex combination of the relative frequencies associated with it by the given two income distributions——e.g., the income distribution of a country is...

Hammond (J Econ Theory 11, 465–467, 1975), Meyer (J Econ Theory 11, 119–132, 1975), and Lambert (The distribution and redistribution of income, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2001) provide the formal result connecting leximin and the idea of extreme inequality aversion for social...

The ethical view of prioritarianism holds the following: if an extra bundle of attributes is to be allocated to either of two individuals, then priority should be given to the worse off among the two. We consider multidimensional poverty comparisons with cardinal and ordinal attributes and...

We propose a criterion to rank poverty measures on the basis of distribution-sensitivity. The criterion compares reactions to ‘lossy’ transfers among the poor. We focus on the class of rank-dependent poverty measures and provide distribution-sensitivity rankings of the poverty gap ratio, the...

We argue that normative indices of multidimensional inequality do not only measure a distribution’s extent of inequity (i.e., the gaps between the better-off and the worse-off), but also its extent of inefficiency (i.e., the non-realized mutually beneficial exchanges of goods). We provide a...

type="main" xml:id="ecca12059-abs-0001" <p>We study the evolution of population-weighted between-country inequality in the period 1980–2009. Whereas previous studies almost exclusively focused on relative inequality measures, we consider relative, absolute and intermediate versions of the Lorenz...</p>

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.

The unidimensional Pigou-Dalton transfer principle demands that a regressive transfer in income--a transfer from worse-off (poor) to better-off (rich)--decreases social welfare. In a multidimensional setting the direct link between income (or any other attribute) and individual well-being is...

Many distributional conflicts are characterized by the presence of acquired rights. The basic structure of these conflicts is that of the so-called claims problem, in which an amount of money has to be divided among individuals with differing claims and the total amount available falls short of...