This paper looks at both within country and among country inequality. In the spirit of Dalton[1920] and Atkinson[1970] this paper reports estimates of the welfare loss arising from inequality. The paper also explores the implications of Duesenberry style interdependent utility functions when a...

This paper examines five problems with the inflation indexing procedures used by the Social Security Administration in taking inflation into account when calculating Old Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) Benefits. Several of these problems have capricious distributional consequences. For...

After demonstrating that any nontrivial technique for seasonally adjusting time series inevitably leads to certain distortions of the data, an effort is made to provide explicit motivation for the process of seasonal adjustment for purposes of appraising current economic conditions. Inherent...

This paper examines five problems with the indexing procedures used by the Social Security Administration of the United States in taking inflation into account when calculating Old Age and Survivor Insurance (OASI) Benefits. Because of the commin-gling of unindexed with indexed earnings, a...

This paper examines five problems with the inflation indexing procedures used by the Social Security Administration of the United States in taking inflation into account when calculating Old Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) Benefits. Because of Problem #1, the commingling of unindexed with...