This paper provides an axiomatic characterization of two rules for comparing alternative sets of objects on the basis of the diversity that they offer. The framework considered assumes a finite universe of objects and an a priori given ordinal quadernary relation that compares alternative pairs...

This paper proposes a new method of calculating the proportion of permanently impoverished persons among persons in poverty as a whole. The paper shows that the widely used Shorrocks-Index for decomposing permanent and transitory inequality can also be acquired to describe poverty. This method...

The measurement of social norms plays a pivotal role in many social sciences. While economists predominantly conduct experiments, sociologists rather employ (factorial) surveys. Both methods, however, suffer from distinct weaknesses. Experiments, on the one hand, often fall short in the...

This paper shows how distance functions, a tool typically employed in production economics to measure the distance between a set of inputs and a set of outputs, can be employed to approximate a composite measure encompassing the many dimensions of well-being. It also illustrates how to implement...

Trust is a concept that has attracted significant attention in economic theory and research within the last two decades: it has been applied in a number of contexts and has been investigated both as an explanatory and as a dependent variable. In this paper, we explore the questions of what...

Using representative survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) for 2006, we show that the magnitude of such health inequality measures as the concentration index (CI) depends crucially on the underlying health measure. The highest degree of inequality is found when...

This paper develops an axiomatic approach to the measurement of social exclusion. At the individual level, social exclusion is viewed in terms of deprivation of the person concerned with respect to different functionings in the society. At the aggregate level we treat social exclusion as a...

This paper derives a basic formula for the measure of social welfare, a second order approximation to the difference of the value of the Bergson-Samuelson social welfare function between the socially optimal resource allocation and the one in the present suboptimal economy. We discuss pros and...

Combined with the expansion of economic literature on the role of ethnicity, new indices were developed to do justice to its complexity. The current indices are generally based on pre-defined groups, disregarding the (dis)similarities between them. This is sufficient to calculate the most common...

In the age of globalization, the question whether inequality in the world rose or fell down, is a hot topic. Leading scholars in the field of economic inequality measurement developed methods to estimate empirically the distribution of welfare (income) amongst world citizens. Despite their...