A recent trend in the study of poverty is to consider a relative poverty line, one that is responsive to the nature of the income distribution. We develop an axiomatic approach to the determination of an amalgam poverty line. Given a reference income (e.g., the mean or the median), the amalgam...

Traditional indices of bi-dimensional inequality and polarization were developed for cardinal variables and cannot be used to quantify dispersion in ordinal measures of socioeconomic status and health. This chapter develops two approaches to the measurement of inequality and bi-polarization...

This paper proposes a generalized approach to the issue of decomposing inequality by population subgroups. This generalization uses the concept of Shapley value decomposition and takes into account the fact that either the between or the within groups inequality may be considered as residual...

The aim of this chapter is to analyze the sources of earnings dispersion between trainees and nontrainees. We stress three mechanisms by which investment in general training may affect wage inequality: directly via participation to a general training program and indirectly via the selection...

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to analyze the changes that took place in occupational segregation by gender, nationality, and age in Switzerland during the period 1970–2000. Methodology – The paper starts by using correspondence analysis to detect changes in occupational segregation by...

This article axiomatically derives a class of numerical indices of integration (equality) in the distribution of different types of workers across occupations. The associated segregation (inequality) indices parallel one form of multidimensional generalized Gini inequality indices. A comparison...

Although the measurement of segregation by gender or ethnic group in the labor force has long been of interest to both sociologists and economists, the sociology and economics literatures on this topic have evolved in different ways and remained largely separate. This has also been the case to...

This paper has two goals. First it determines the respective impacts of variations in the tax rates and in the distribution of pre-tax incomes on changes in tax progressivity in the United Kingdom during the period 1960–2001. Second it checks whether macroeconomic variables or the political...

This chapter attempts to explicitly integrate the idea of reference group when measuring relative deprivation. It assumes that in assessing his situation in society an individual compares himself with individuals whose environment can be considered as being similar to his. By environment we mean...

This paper is an extension of Blinder's (1973) and Oaxaca's (1973) famous decomposition. While they looked at the determinants of the wage gap between two groups, this paper not only considers any number of groups but it also proposes a decomposition technique that permits to analyze the...