Since the late 1970s, the price indices underlying the poverty lines in India have been updated using aggregate indices. Widespread criticism of these indices led to the adoption of a new official methodology in 2011 based on unit values from con- sumption survey data. We propose an alternative...

This paper makes an attempt to incorporate benets from unpaid public services into consumption decisions to arrive at more accurate measures of poverty and inequality. The analysis is based on primary data collected from 40 villages in Bihar in 2012. Three types of public services are...

Most high and middle-income countries showed symptoms of skill-biased technological change in the 1980s. India — a low income country — did not, perhaps because India's traditionally controlled economy may have limited the transfer of technologies from abroad. However the economy underwent a...

Differences in individual wealth holdings are widely viewed as a driving force of economic inequality. However, as this finding relies on cross-section data, we may confuse older with wealthier. We propose a new method to adjust for age effects in cross-sections, which eliminates transitory...

This paper shows one way of generalizing the standard framework of inequality measurement to allow for a distinction between fair and unfair inequalities. We introduce the unfairness Lorenz curve and the unfairness Gini, which are generalizations of the standard versions of the Lorenz curve and...

Standard ways of measuring real income are known to be inconsistent with consumer preferences. We provide preference-consistent estimates of real income, based on the income-specific price indices that are consistent with nonhomothetic preferences. We find that existing measures, such as Geary,...

China’s economic development in recent decades has been tremendous, but subject to debate. This paper calculates regional prices that make incomes comparable across both time and space using the Engel-curve approach. Incomes are adjusted using these price indices, providing new estimates of...

This paper studies the role of family background in explaining differences in the willingness to compete. By combining data from a lab experiment conducted with a representative sample of adolescents in Norway and high quality register data on family background, we show that family background is...