Distributional Dominance With Trimmed Data Cowell, Frank A; Victoria-Feser, Maria-Pia
Journal of business & economic statistics,
07/2006, Letnik:
24, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Distributional dominance criteria are commonly applied to draw welfare inferences about comparisons, but conclusions drawn from empirical implementations of dominance criteria may be influenced by ...data contamination. We examine a nonparametric approach to refining Lorenz-type comparisons and apply the technique to two important examples from the Luxembourg Income Study database.
We examine the role of laboratory questionnaire-experiments and recent applied empirical research on attitudes in understanding the relationships between people's perceptions of inequality and their ...perceptions of risk. We consider risk in three interpretations: ‘in vacuo’, in day-to-day life and in the original position.
Starting from the axiomatization of polarization contained in Esteban and Ray (1994) and Chakravarty and Majumder (2001), we investigate whether people's perceptions of income polarization are ...consistent with the key axioms. This is carried out using a questionnaire–experimental approach that combines both paper questionnaires and on‐line interactive techniques. The responses suggest that important axioms which serve to differentiate polarization from inequality—e.g. increased bipolarization—as well as other distinctive features of polarization, i.e. the non‐monotonous behavior attributed to polarization, are not widely accepted.
Mobility in C hina Chen, Yi; Cowell, Frank A.
The Review of income and wealth,
06/2017, Letnik:
63, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The evidence on rank and income mobility in
C
hina reveals an important change around the year 2000. Using panel data from the
C
hina Health and Nutrition Survey we show that rank mobility fell ...markedly from the decade immediately preceding the millennium to the decade immediately following: in this respect
C
hina is becoming noticeably more rigid. By contrast income mobility has carried on increasing; so has income inequality. The simultaneous increase in rigidity and inequality presents
C
hina with a challenging policy problem.
Complaints and inequality Cowell, Frank; Ebert, Udo
Social choice and welfare,
08/2004, Letnik:
23, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Temkin (1986, 1993) set 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 new class of inequality indices and an inequality ordering. This class of indices has a family relationship to well-known measures of inequality, deprivation and poverty. The ordering is shown to have properties analogous to second-order dominance results.
It is known from the literature on uncertainty that in cases where individuals express a preference for a high win-probability bet over a bet with high winnings they nevertheless will bid more to ...obtain the bet with high winnings. We investigate whether a similar phenomenon applies in the parallel social-choice situation. Here decisions are to be made between a distribution with a large group of high-income people and a distribution with a small group of very high-income people. Results from a number of experimental designs are analysed. We are grateful for helpful comments from three referees of this journal, Peter Dolton, Graham Loomes, Dirk Van der gaer and seminar participants at the LSE and the University of Gent. We also thank Guillermo Cruces for computational assistance.
Ranking theorems based on concepts of stochastic dominance are fundamental to the analysis of income distributions as well as to finance theory and other aspects of the theory of choice under ...uncertainty. As abstract theoretical constructs they provide a connection between the philosophical basis of welfare judgements and elementary statistical tools for describing distributions. In practical applications they suggest useful ways in which simple computational procedures may be used to draw inferences from collections of empirical income distributions.
Abstract
Much of the theoretical literature on inequality assumes that the equalisand is a cardinal variable like income or wealth. However, health status is generally measured as a categorical ...variable expressing a qualitative order. Traditional solutions involve reclassifying the variable by means of qualitative models and relying on inequality measures that are mean independent. We argue that the way status is conceptualised has important theoretical implications for measurement as well as for policy analysis. We also bring to the data a recently proposed approach to measuring self-reported health inequality that meets both rigorous and practical considerations. We draw upon the World Health Survey data to examine alternative pragmatic methods for making health-inequality comparisons. Findings suggest significant differences in health-inequality measurement and that regional and country patterns of inequality orderings do not coincide with any reasonable categorisation of countries by health system organisation.
Inequality measures are often used to summarize information about empirical income distributions. However the resulting picture of the distribution and of changes in the distribution can be severely ...distorted if the data are contaminated. The nature of this distortion will in general depend upon the underlying properties of the inequality measure. We investigate this issue theoretically using a technique based on the influence function, and illustrate the magnitude of the effect using a simulation. We consider both direct nonparametric estimation from the sample, and indirect estimation using a parametric model; in the latter case we demonstrate the application of a robust estimation procedure. We apply our results to two micro-data examples.
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