When is one distribution (of income, consumption, or some other economic variable) more equal or better than another? This question has proven difficult to answer in situations where distribution functions intersect and no unambiguous ranking can be attained without introducing weaker criteria...

We propose a general framework to unambiguously compare distributions functions in an economically interpretable way. Our framework provides complete ranking of any set of distributions and money metric interpretation of the social welfare level of a dominating distribution as compared to a...

This paper presents a methodology for comparing income rank volatility profiles over time and across distributions. While most of the existing measures are affected by changes in marginal distributions, this paper proposes a framework that is based on individuals’ relative positions in the...

The Gini index, a widely used economic inequality measure, is computed using data whose designs involve clustering and stratification, generally known as complex household surveys. Under complex household survey, we develop two novel procedures for estimating Gini index with a pre-specified...

Rising poverty and inequality increases the risk of social instability in countries all around the world. For measuring poverty and inequality there exists a variety of statistical indicators. Estimating these indicators is trivial as long as the income variable is measured on a metric scale....

Survey under-coverage of top incomes leads to bias in survey-based estimates of overall income inequality. Using income tax record data in combination with survey data is a potential approach to address the problem; we consider here the UK's pioneering "SPI adjustment" method that implements...