This paper develops distribution-free statistical inference procedures to test for changes in tax progressivity. Tests for both the Reynolds-Smolensky index of residual progression and the Kakwani index of liability progression are provided. Changes in tax progressivity in three Western...

Recent advances in the evaluation of the economic well-being are applied to assess the status of elderly Americans in the 1980s and 1990s. Micro data for the elderly and nonelderly populations are analyzed using stochastic dominance. A distinguishing feature of the research is that it goes...

Economists have long speculated that envy and malice play important roles in economic decisions. Surprisingly little empirical evidence has been offered in support of such claims. This paper uses experimental and multinomial logit techniques to estimate the effects of envy and malice in economic...

The paper develops simple statistical test procedures for generalized decomposable poverty measures. It is shown that the estimates of the decomposable poverty indices, including the overall and various sub-group poverty indices, have (asymptotic) jointly normal distributions. The full...

This paper provides distribution-free inferences for testing marginal rank dominance and Lorenz, and generalized Lorenz dominances. Marginal dominances refer to ordinary dominance relationships holding between an income distribution and its dependent after-event distribution. Using the elegant...

This paper investigates the possibility of increasing the ordering power of additively separable poverty measures beyond the condition of second degree stochastic dominance by considering third degree stochastic dominance. For a fixed poverty line, the ordering power can be significantly...

This note graphically illustrates the power of various poverty ordering conditions. Using the Kolm three-person simplex, we are able to show that (1) for a fixed poverty line the power may be increased as higher degrees of stochastic dominance are considered, (2) for a single but variable...