This paper adopts a counterfactual decomposition analysis to analyse cross-country differences in the size of household wealth and levels of household wealth inequality. The findings of the paper suggest that the biggest share of cross-country differences is not due to differences in the...

We examine the performance of measures of mobility when allowance is made for the possibility of data contamination. We find that “singlestage” indices – those that are applied directly to a sample from a multivariate income distribution – usually prove to be non-robust in the face of...

Temkin (1986,1993) sets out a philosophical basis for the analysis of income inequality that provides an important alternative to the mainstream welfarist approach. We show that the Temkin principles can be characterised by a parsimonious axiomatic structure and we use this structure to derive a...

We examine the relationship between risk analysis and inequality analysis, using a questionnaire-experimental approach .The experiments focus on the effect of income transformations on the perceived rankings of income distri- butions in either a risk or inequality context. Both context and...

We examine individuals’ distributional orderings in a number of contexts. This is done by using a questionnaire-experiment that is presented to respondents in any one of seven “flavours” or interpretations of the basic distributional problem. The flavours include inequality, risk, social...

The tax-payer-as-gambler (TAG) model of tax non-compliance is the classic vehicle for providing some simple insights. Under fairly general conditions this model supports the following four propositions: (1) if the rate of return to evasion is positive everyone evades tax; (2) people with higher...

Distributional dominance criteria are commonly applied to draw welfare in- ferences about comparisons, but conclusions drawn from empirical imple- mentations of dominance criteria may be inßuenced by data contamination. We examine a non-parametric approach to reÞning Lorenz-type comparisons...

Modelling Lorenz curves (LC) for stochastic dominance comparisons is central to the analysis of income distribution. It is conventional to use non-parametric statistics based on empirical income cumulants which are in the construction of LC and other related second-order dominance criteria....

Using a simple axiomatic structure we characterise two classes of inequality indices - absolute and relative - that take into account “envy” in the income distribution. The concept of envy incorporated here concerns the distance of each person’s income from his or her immediately richer...