A good prediction is very important for scientific, economic, and administrative purposes. It is therefore necessary to know whether a predictor is skillful enough to predict the future. Given the increased reliance on predictions in various disciplines, a prediction skill index (PSI) is...

The pursuit of having an appropriate level of income inequality should be viewed as one of the biggest challenges facing academic scholars as well as policy makers. Unfortunately, research on this issue is currently lacking. This study is the first to introduce the theoretical concept of...

Rank-size distributions of local government debt, regardless of the way in which data is categorized, namely, regions, types, or all local governments, are found not to be normally distributed but consistent with a mathematical principle known as power law. This implies that local government...

Given many popular functional forms for the Lorenz curve do not have a closed-form expression for the Gini index and no study has utilized the observed Gini index to estimate parameter(s) associated with the corresponding parametric functional form, a simple method for estimating the Lorenz...

To simultaneously overcome the limitation of the Gini index in that it is less sensitive to inequality at the tails of income distribution and the limitation of the inter-decile ratios that ignore inequality in the middle of income distribution, an inequality index is introduced. It comprises...