We develop a general approach to estimation and inference for income distributions using grouped or aggregate data that are typically available in the form of population shares and class mean incomes, with unknown group bounds. We derive generic moment conditions and an optimal weight matrix...

type="main" <p>Increasing global interaction between economies over the last few decades has led to growing interest on the implications of globalization. Of particular interest has been the distributional impact of globalization and whether this has been equity enhancing. Contributing to this...</p>

Using a method-of-moments estimator, flexible three-parameter beta distributions are fitted to aggregate country-level income data to overcome an untenable assumption of previous studies that persons within each income group receive the same income. Regional and global income distributions are...

Increasing global interaction between economies over the last few decades has led to growing interest on the implications of globalization. Of particular interest has been the distributional impact of globalization and whether this has been equity enhancing. Contributing to this debate,...

Various inequality and social welfare measures often depend heavily on the choice of a distribution of income. Picking a distribution that best fits the data involves throwing away information and does not allow for the fact that a wrong choice can be made. Instead, Bayesian model averaging...

Income distributions for developing countries in Asia are modeled using beta-2 distributions, which are estimated by a method of moments procedure applied to grouped data. Estimated parameters of these distributions are used to calculate measures of inequality, poverty, and pro-poor growth in...

We develop a GMM procedure for estimating income distributions from grouped data with unknown group bounds. The approach enables us to obtain standard errors for the estimated parameters and functions of the parameters, such as inequality and poverty measures, and to test the validity of an...