This paper discusses the measurement of ex-ante inequality of opportunity for binary outcome variables. We argue that the use of scale but not translation invariant inequality measures such as the dissimilarity index might be problematic depending on the aim of the study. The main concern is...

This study proposes the mode-based decomposition approach to better examine the change of the more impoverished population's wealth into growth and distribution effects. Given Gibrat’s law, the decomposition first approximates the income distribution to lognormal distribution using the maximum...

In this paper I show that recently proposed methods to quantify the level of inequality of opportunity are likely to be downward biased when the dependent variable is a proxy for an unobserved concept. Using a multidimensional framework of development, such as the capability approach, or a...

Recentered influence functions (RIFs) are statistical tools popularized by Firpo, Fortin, and Lemieux (2009) for analyzing unconditional partial effects on quantiles in a regression analysis framework (unconditional quantile regressions). The flexibility and simplicity of these tools has opened...

We examine three families of one-parameter functional forms for estimating Lorenz curves: power (elementary and Pareto), exponential (elementary and Gupta) and fractional (Rohde). The computing difficulties to determine the headcount ratio (i.e., the percentage of poor) have been underestimated....

This paper introduces in statistics the notion of the barycenter of the distribution of a non-negative random variable and explores its relation with the Gini index, the concentration area, and the Gini’s mean difference. The introduction of the barycenter allows for new economic, geometrical,...

This paper introduces in statistics the notion of the barycenter of the distribution of a non-negative random variable Y with a positive finite mean μY and the quantile function Q(x). The barycenter is denoted by μX and defined as the expected value of the random variable X having the...