Relative poverty lines such as one-half of median income have been widely used in poverty comparisons. The U.S. government has also been urged to adopt the notion of relative poverty lines. This paper contributes to the literature by developing statistical inferences for testing poverty measures...

We derive the asymptotic sampling distribution of various estimators frequently used to order distributions in terms of poverty, welfare and inequality. This includes estimators of most of the poverty indices currently in use, as well as estimators of the curves used to infer stochastic...

Total household income inequality can be very different from inequality measured at the income per-capita level but only in recent years has the patter of this divergence been investigated. In this paper, result form Coulter et al. (1992) using a one-parameter equivalence scale are updated using...

This paper develops the link between poverty and inequality by focusing on a class of poverty indices (some of them well-known) which aggregate normative concerns for absolute and relative deprivation. The indices are distinguished by a parameter that captures the ethical sensitivity of poverty...

A preliminary step in the measurement of inequality regards the choice of the index to use. Several indices exist, each one responding to a built-in aversion to inequality, and the choice affects conclusions. But how much? And in which way? We test the ranking correlation between inequality...

This paper examines the interactions between household matching, inequality, and per capita income. We develop a model in which agents decide whether to become skilled or unskilled, form households, consume and have children. We show that the equilibrium sorting of spouses by skill type (their...

Cross-country evidence on inflation and income inequality suggests that they are positively correlated. The hypothesis that this correlation is the outcome of a distributional conflict underlying the determination of fiscal policy is explored.

This paper focuses on various issues that need to be considered when an analyst wishes to predict the demand for a new technological product. The interplay of the strategic behavior of the firm, notably with regard to preannouncing the future availability of the new product and the behavior of...