Recent studies have assessed the impact of choice of equivalence scale on economists' measurement of the equivalent income distribution. F. A. E. Coulter, F. Cowell, and S. Jenkins (1992) has found that equivalence scales used in the U.K. official statistics 'provide lower estimates of the...

The exact measurement of the welfare costs of tax and price reform requires a detailed knowledge of individual preferences. Typically, first-order approximations of welfare costs are calculated avoiding detailed knowledge of substitution effects. The authors derive second-order approximations...