SPDO Knowledge Exchange Brief

Geographical inequalities in England on the eve of the pandemic

Polina Obolenskaya

This briefing forms part of the Nuffield Foundation funded research programme, Social Policies and Distributional Outcomes in a Changing Britain (SPDO), which examines social policies and social inequalities between the ...Read more...

Social Policies and Distributional Outcomes Research Paper

The Conservative Goverments’ Record on Social Security: Policies, Spending and Outcomes, May 2015 to pre-COVID 2020

Kerris Cooper and John Hills

This paper uses the Social Policies and Distributional Outcomes framework to evaluate how social security policies evolved, how public spending changed, the effects of these on the generosity of the system, and evidence ...Read more...

SPDO Knowledge Exchange Brief

Ethnic inequalities on the eve of the pandemic

Kerris Cooper

This research, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, evaluated the impact of changes in social policies on inequalities since 2015 up until the eve of the pandemic. This briefing focuses on the findings that relate to ethni...Read more...

Development Discussion Paper

Misallocation in the Public Sector? Cross-Country Evidence from Two Million Primary Schools

Torsten Figueiredo Walter

This paper examines how the allocation of teachers across public primary schools differs between countries and the extent to which this can explain differences in educational outcomes. First, I build a new global school-...Read more...

Journal Article

Longitudinal and Life Course Studies:

Young British adults homeownership circumstances and the role of intergenerational transfers

Ellie Suh

Despite the continuing preference for homeownership, it has become increasingly difficult for young adults to own a home in Britain. House prices have increased faster than real earnings between the mid-1990s and the 201...Read more...

CASEbrief

The National Living Wage and falling earnings inequality

Abigail McKnight and Kerris Cooper

The more generous National Living Wage replaced the National Minimum Wage for employees aged 25 and over in April 2016. In April 2020 it is due to increase to 60% of the average wage. In this policy brief we assess the ...Read more...

CASEpaper

Intra-household inequality and adult material deprivation in Europe

Eleni Karagiannaki and Tania Burchardt

In most research on living standards, material deprivation is measured using household-level material deprivation indicators. However, if resources are not shared equally within households, conventional material deprivat...Read more...

CASEreport

SUMMARY – Living on Different Incomes in London: Can public consensus identify a 'riches line'?

Tania Burchardt, Abigail Davis, Ian Gough, Katharina Hecht, Donald Hirsch, Karen Rowlingson and Kate Summers

There is widespread public and political concern about economic inequality in the UK today but relatively little research exploring people’s opinions about high incomes, wealth and what it means to be rich. This innovati...Read more...

CASEreport

Living on Different Incomes in London: Can public consensus identify a 'riches line'?

Abigail Davis, Katharina Hecht, Tania Burchardt, Ian Gough, Donald Hirsch, Karen Rowlingson and Kate Summers

London is home to vast and visible economic inequality, where the richest 10 per cent own 61 per cent of overall wealth, while at the same time four in ten Londoners do not earn enough for what is considered by the publi...Read more...

CASEreport

Understanding the relationship between inequalities and poverty: policy toolkit

Irene Bucelli, Abigail McKnight and Kate Summers

This toolkit examines policies with a potential 'double dividend': policies that could lead to reductions in both poverty and inequality in the UK. The selection of policies has been informed by a larger research progra...Read more...

CASEpaper

Understanding the relationship between inequalities and poverty: a review of dynamic mechanisms

Magali Duque and Abigail McKnight

In this paper we examine the evidence on how dynamic mechanisms, which include earnings and income mobility, poverty dynamics, social mobility and the accumulation of risk and advantage over the lifecycle, may be a contr...Read more...

CASEpaper

Understanding the relationship between poverty, inequality and growth: a review of existing evidence

Abigail McKnight

This paper reviews the theoretical literature and empirical evidence on the relationship between poverty, inequality and economic growth. It finds evidence that economic inequality is good for growth as well as new conv...Read more...

CASEpaper

Understanding the relationship between inequalities and poverty: mechanisms associated with crime, the legal system and punitive sanctions

Magali Duque and Abigail McKnight

This paper outlines the various issues pertaining to how crime, the legal system and punitive sanctions may provide a mechanism through which inequality is positively related to poverty. We analyse trends in crime rates...Read more...

Social Policies and Distributional Outcomes Research Paper

Flat-lining or seething beneath the surface? Two decades of changing economic inequality in the UK

Polina Obolenskaya and John Hills

This paper analyses what happened to economic inequalities in the United Kingdom in the two decades from 1995-96. In aggregate, inequality changes were unremarkable, especially by comparison with sharp increases in the ...Read more...

CASEreport

Understanding the Relationship between Poverty and Inequality, Overview report

John Hills, Abigail McKnight, Irene Bucelli, Eleni Karagiannaki, Polly Vizard, Lin Yang, Magali Duque and Marc Rucci

An understanding that poverty and inequality are inextricably linked has given rise to a number of large international organisations setting joint inequality-poverty reduction targets on the basis that poverty cannot be...Read more...

CASEpaper

The net effect of housing-related costs and advantages on the relationship between inequality and poverty

Lin Yang

This paper reviews the evidence of how the welfare state can shape the relationship between economic inequality and poverty through the channels of taxes, transfers and public good provision. In particular, we examine ho...Read more...

CASEpaper

The relationship between poverty and inequality: Resource constraint mechanisms

Lin Yang

This paper examines how inequality from the interaction of income and housing circumstances changes the relative position of households in the income distribution, and influences the incidence and socio-demographic prof...Read more...

Public Economics Programme Discussion Paper

Inequality Measurement and the Rich: Why inequality increased more than we thought

Frank A Cowell and Emmanuel Flachaire

Many standard inequality measures can be written as ratios with the mean in the denominator. When one income moves away from equality, both the numerator and the denominator may vary in the same direction and such indic...Read more...

Book

Decent incomes for all: Improving policies in Europe

Edited by Bea Cantillon, Tim Goedemé and John Hills

This book aims to shed new light on recent poverty trends in the European Union, responses by European welfare states, and how progress can be made to realize a decent income for all. The text analyzes the effect of ...Read more...

CASEpaper

Inequality, poverty and the grounds of our normative concerns

Irene Bucelli

Policy debates surrounding poverty and inequality try to find practical solutions to what we should do to tackle these phenomena. But what are the grounds for being concerned about poverty or about inequality? To what ex...Read more...

Special or Commissioned Report

Research report for Oxfam:

Double Trouble: A review of the relationship between UK poverty and economic inequality

AbigailMcKnight, Magali Duque and Mark Rucci

The link between inequality and poverty has been highlighted by a number of international organisations, which have outlined a series of policy recommendations supporting the view that high levels of inequality need to...Read more...

Public Economics Programme Discussion Paper

Welfare and Inequality Comparisons for Uni- and Multi-dimensional Distributions of Ordinal Data

Frank A Cowell, Martyna Kobus and Radoslaw Kurek

Decision makers and social planners are often faced with a problem of evaluating distributions of ordinal variables i.e. variables for which there are no numbers but only the ordering, such as, for example, self-reported...Read more...

CASEpaper

Inequality and the Capability Approach

Tania Burchardt and Rod Hick

Inequality has acquired a newfound prominence in academic and political debate. While scholars working with the capability approach have succeeded in influencing the nature of debate about the conceptualisation and measu...Read more...

Econometrics Paper

Local M-estimation with discontinuous criterion for dependent and limited observations

Myung Hwan Seo and Taisuke Otsu

This paper examines asymptotic properties of local M-estimators under three sets of high-level conditions. These conditions are sufficiently general to cover the minimum volume predictive region, conditional maximum scor...Read more...

Public Economics Programme Discussion Paper

Pareto models, top incomes, and recent trends in UK income inequality

Stephen P Jenkins

I determine UK income inequality levels and trends by combining inequality estimates from tax return data (for the ‘rich’) and household survey data (for the ‘non-rich’), taking advantage of the better coverage of top i...Read more...

CASEpaper

Spatial microsimulation estimates of household income distributions in London boroughs, 2001 and 2011

Alex Fenton

Spatial microsimulation (SMS) is a range of techniques for estimating the local distribution of a variable – here, household income – by combining social survey microdata with Census or administrative population totals. ...Read more...

CASEpaper

Income Poverty, Affluence and Polarisation Viewed From The Median

Rolf Aaberge, A.B. Atkinson and Henrik Sigstad

The present paper brings together different features of the distribution of income – poverty, affluence and dispersion – in a single framework that allows ready comparisons across countries. We believe that such a unifie...Read more...

Public Economics Programme Discussion Paper

Modern Family: Female Breadwinners and the Intergenerational Transmission of Gender Norms

Panos Mavrokonstantis

In this paper I investigate the intergenerational transmission of gender norms. The norm I focus on is the traditional view that it is the role of the mother to look after young children and the role of the father to be...Read more...

SPCC Working Paper

Understanding the improved performance of disadvantaged pupils in London

Jo Blanden, Ellen Greaves, Paul Gregg, Lindsey Macmillan and Luke Sibieta

London is an educational success story, with especially good schooling results for more disadvantaged pupils. This is a dramatic reversal of fortunes. This paper uses a combination of administrative and survey data to ...Read more...

Public Economics Programme Discussion Paper

Wealth Inequality in the United States since 1913: Evidence from Capitalized Income Tax Data

Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman

This paper combines income tax returns with macroeconomic household balance sheets to estimate the distribution of wealth in the United States since 1913. We estimate wealth by capitalizing the incomes reported by indivi...Read more...

CASEpaper

A fresh look at an old question: is pro-poor targeting of cash transfers more effective than universal systems at reducing inequality and poverty?

Abigail McKnight

This paper presents findings on the changing effectiveness of cash transfers and income taxes on inequality and poverty reduction in four EU countries - the UK, Italy, Sweden and France. We use long time series (spanning...Read more...

CASEpaper

Monitoring the evolution of income poverty and real incomes over time

A.B. Atkinson, Anne-Catherine Guio and Eric Marlier

This paper brings together two approaches to the monitoring of household living standards: the macro-economic (national accounts) analysis of aggregates and the social indicators based on household microdata (European Un...Read more...

SPCC Research Report

The Changing Anatomy of Economic Inequality in London (2007-2013)

Polly Vizard, Polina Obolenskaya, Eleni Karagiannaki, Jack Cunliffe, Stephanie Thomson, Chris Grollman and Ruth Lupton

In this report we examine changing patterns of inequality in London over the period 2007-2013. We examine how the distribution of key economic outcomes - including income and wealth, employment and unemployment, earnings...Read more...

SPCC Research Report

Falling Behind, Getting Ahead: The Changing Structure of Inequality in the UK, 2007-2013

John Hills, Jack Cunliffe, Polina Obolenskaya and Eleni Karagiannaki

This report looks in detail at inequality within the UK, 2007-2013, which groups have gained and lost - comparing men and women, and housing tenure, region, ethnicity, and disability as well as age group. Detailed examin...Read more...

CASEpaper

The income distribution in the UK: A picture of advantage and disadvantage

Stephen P Jenkins

This paper describes the UK income distribution and how it has evolved over the last 50 years. It also includes some comparisons with the income distributions of other rich countries. Multiple perspectives on the distrib...Read more...

CASEpaper

Piketty in the long run

Frank A Cowell

I examine the idea of 'the long run' in Piketty (2014) and related works. In contrast to simplistic interpretations of long-run models of income- and wealth-distribution Piketty (2014) draws on a rich economic analysis t...Read more...

SPCC Working Paper

The Coalition's Record on Cash Transfers, Poverty and Inequality 2010-2015

John Hills

Presenting his 2010 spending review, George Osborne, the Chancellor, insisted that 'those with the broadest shoulders should bear the greatest burden'. How did the Coalition's benefit and direct tax policies affect the d...Read more...

CASEpaper

Disabled People's Financial Histories: Uncovering the disability wealth-penalty

Abigail McKnight

It is well established that on average disabled people and the households in which they live face greater financial disadvantage in terms of income than their counterparts. What is less well understood is how they fare i...Read more...

SPCC Research Report

Prosperity, Poverty and Inequality in London 2000/01-2010/11

Ruth Lupton, Polly Vizard, Amanda Fitzgerald, Alex Fenton, Ludovica Gambaro and Jack Cunliffe

This report looks at changes in poverty and inequality in London during the 2000s, with a focus on the impact of recession from 2008. It also considers how a decade has changed the geography of poverty in the Capital....Read more...

SPCC Research Report

Winners and Losers in the Crisis: The Changing Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK 2007 - 2010

John Hills, Jack Cunliffe, Ludovica Gambaro, Polina Obolenskaya and Ruth Lupton

Despite being better qualified than previous generations, people in their twenties were worst hit by the crisis in terms of unemployment, pay and incomes....Read more...

SPCC Working Paper

Labour's Record on Cash Transfers, Poverty, Inequality and the Lifecycle 1997 - 2010

John Hills

Cash transfers (benefits and tax credits) are crucial to the way that inequalities develop over time. This paper looks at how Labour’s aims, policies and achievements on poverty and inequality related to its reforms of a...Read more...

CASEpaper

Public policy and inequalities of choice and autonomy

Tania Burchardt, Martin Evans and Holly Holder

This article explores the conceptualisation of choice as autonomy using three components – self-reflection, active decision-making, and quality and range of options - and investigates empirical inequalities in autonomy, ...Read more...

CASEpaper

Accounting for cross-country differences in wealth inequality

Frank A Cowell, Eleni Karagiannaki and Abigail McKnight

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...Read more...

CASEpaper

Wealth accumulation in Great Britain 1995-2005: The role of house prices and the life cycle

Francesca Bastagli and John Hills

This paper examines trends in the distribution of household wealth in Great Britain from 1995 to 2005 using the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). The data show that wealth is very unevenly distributed and reveal a w...Read more...

CASEpaper

Mapping and measuring the distribution of household wealth: A cross-country analysis

Frank A Cowell, Eleni Karagiannaki and Abigail McKnight

In this paper we compare the level, composition and distribution of household wealth in five industrial countries: the UK, US, Italy, Finland and Sweden. We exploit the harmonized data within the Luxembourg Wealth Study,...Read more...

CASEpaper

Deliberative research as a tool to make value judgements

Tania Burchardt

The ‘deliberative turn’ in democratic theory has generated a wealth of deliberative experiments. The purpose of deliberation as a research technique (as opposed to policymaking or public consultation) is distinctive: to ...Read more...

Development Discussion Paper

Enfranchisement and Representation: Italy 1909-1913

Valentino Larcinese

This paper presents evidence on the consequences of the 1912 introduction of 'quasiuniversal' male suffrage in Italy. The reform increased the electorate from slightly less than three million to 8,650,000 and left the el...Read more...

CASEpaper

Social Housing and Social Exclusion 2000-2011

Rebecca Tunstall

By some definitions, social housing, social housing tenants are necessarily socially excluded. In other terms, in 2000, social housing tenants were at greater risk of being socially excluded than owner occupiers and priv...Read more...

CASEpaper

The Magnitude and Correlates of Inter-vivos Transfers in the UK

Eleni Karagiannaki

This paper uses data from the British Household Panel Survey and the Attitudes to Inheritances Survey to estimate the magnitude of and the factors that are correlated with private inter-household transfers from parents t...Read more...

CASEpaper

The impact of inheritance on the distribution of wealth: Evidence from the UK

Eleni Karagiannaki

In this paper we examine how the distribution of wealth has been changing in UK over the period 1995 to 2005 and how the sum of inheritance received between 1996-2004 contributed to the observed trends in wealth accumula...Read more...

CASEpaper

Rrecent trends in the size and the distribution of inherited wealth in the UK

Eleni Karagiannaki

In this paper we document the evolution of the annual flow of inheritances in the UK during the period 1984-2005 and provide estimates for the overall magnitude and the distribution of inherited wealth. Our results indic...Read more...

DARP Paper

Median Independent Inequality Orderings

Ramses H. Abul Naga and Tarik Yalcin

To date, inequality orderings for ordered response data are only suitable for comparing distributions that share a common median state. In this paper we propose a methodology for comparing distributions irrespective of t...Read more...

Public Economics Programme Discussion Paper

Optimal Control of Externalities in the Presence of Income Taxation

Louis Kaplow

A substantial literature examines second-best environmental policy, focusing particularly on how the Pigouvian directive that marginal taxes should equal marginal external harms needs to be modified in light of the preex...Read more...

CASEreport

An Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK - Report of the National Equality Panel

John Hills

Britain is an unequal country, more so than many other industrial countries and more so than a generation ago. This is manifest in many ways - most obviously in the gap between those who are well off and those who are le...Read more...

CASEpaper

Reducing the Risks to Health: The role of social protection Report of the Social Protection Task Group for the Strategic Review of Health Inequalities in England Post 2010

Howard Glennerster

We demonstrate that the introduction of social protection systems as well as their generosity and coverage have significant impacts on health. Who receives the benefits within the household affects the health outcomes fo...Read more...

Econometrics Paper

Nonparametric Estimation of a Polarization Measure

Gordon Anderson, Oliver Linton and Yoon-Jae Whang

This paper develops methodology for nonparametric estimation of a polarization measure due to Anderson (2004) and Anderson, Ge, and Leo (2006) based on kernel estimation techniques. We give the asymptotic distribution th...Read more...

DARP Paper

Goodness-of-Fit: An Economic Approach

Frank A Cowell, Emmanuel Flachaire and Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay

Specific functional forms are often used in economic models of distributions; goodness-of-fit measures are used to assess whether a functional form is appropriate in the light of real-world data. Standard approaches use ...Read more...

DARP Paper

Inequality Decomposition - A Reconciliation

Frank A Cowell and Carlo V. Fiorio

We show how classic source-decomposition and subgroup-decomposition methods can be reconciled with regression methodology used in the recent literature. We also highlight some pitfalls that arise from uncritical use of t...Read more...

DARP Paper

The Class of Absolute Decomposable Inequality Measures

Kristof Bosmans and Frank A Cowell

We provide a parsimonious axiomatisation of the complete class of absolute nequality indices. Our approach uses only a weak form of decomposability and does not require a priori that the measures be differentiable. ...Read more...

CASEpaper

Changes in earnings inequality and mobility in Great Britain 1978/9-2005/6

Richard Dickens and Abigail McKnight

This paper examines changes in earnings inequality and mobility between 1978/9 and 2005/6 using a unique dataset that includes both those with secure patterns of employment and a wider group who experience periods withou...Read more...

DARP Paper

Statistical Inference for Multidimensional Inequality Indices

Ramses H. Abul Naga

We use the delta method to derive the large sample distribution of multidimensional inequality indices. We also present a simple method for computing standard errors and obtain explicit formulas in the context of two fam...Read more...

DARP Paper

Distributional Orderings: An Approach with Seven Flavours

Wulf Gaertner, Frank A Cowell and Yoram Amiel

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 d...Read more...

DARP Paper

Inequality Measurement for Ordered Response Health Data

Ramses H. Abul Naga and Tarik Yalcin

When health status is an ordered response variable, Allison and Foster (2004) postulate that a distribution Q ?exhibits more inequality than a distribution P ?if Q ?is obtained from P ?via a sequence of median preserving...Read more...

DARP Paper

On the Measurement of Polarisation: A questionnaire study

Yoram Amiel, Frank A Cowell and Xavier Ramos

Starting from the axiomatisation of polarisation contained in Esteban and Ray (1994) and Chakravarty and Majumdar (2001) we investigate whether people’s perceptions of income polarisation is consistent with the key axiom...Read more...

DARP Paper

Inequality and Envy

Frank A Cowell and Udo Ebert

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 ...Read more...

DARP Paper

Growth and inequality: a demographic explanation

Kazutoshi Miyazawa

This paper investigates the relationship between growth and inequality from a demographic point of view. In an extended model of the accidental bequest with endogenous fertility, we analyze the effects of a decrease in o...Read more...

DARP Paper

Inequality: Measurement

Frank A Cowell

This article provides a brief overview of the key issues in inequality measurement and has been prepared for inclusion in the second edition of The New Palgrave....Read more...

DARP Paper

Gini, Deprivation and Complaints

Frank A Cowell

Recent insights from the philosopher Larry Temkin have suggested a new basis for the measurement of income inequality, founded on the notion of individual complaints. about income distribution. Under certain specificatio...Read more...

DARP Paper

Understanding Inequality Trends: Microsimulation Decomposition for Italy

Carlo V. Fiorio

This paper suggests overcoming some limitations of traditional inequality decomposition methods by developing a combination of Burtless (1999) and DiNardo et al. (1996), two different microsimulation methods for decompos...Read more...

DARP Paper

Decomposition of Bivariate Inequality Indices by Attributes

Ramses H. Abul Naga and Pierre-Yves Geoffard

We provide, for the class of relative bidimensional inequality indices, a decomposition of inequality into two univariate Atkinson-Kolm-Sen indices and a third statistic which depends on the joint distribution of resourc...Read more...

DARP Paper

Knowledge-Based Economic Development: Mass Media and the Weightless Economy REVISED MARCH 2009

Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay

We examine associations of mass media and information and communications technologies (ICT) as knowledge-based infrastructures on some economic development outcomes. We .nd that several mass media and ICT penetration var...Read more...

DARP Paper

Growth and Inequality: A Demographic Explanation,(published in Journal of Population Economics, vol. 19 (2006), pp. 559-578)

Kazutoshi Miyazawa

This paper investigates the relationship between growth and inequality from a demographic point of view. In an extended model of the accidental bequest with endogenous fertility, we analyze the effects of a decrease in t...Read more...

CASEpaper

Poverty and Inequality and Social Policy in China

Bingqin Li and David Piachaud

Despite prolonged economic growth, poverty has become a more notable and noted feature of Chinese society. The paper examines three phases of development since the foundation of the People’s Republic: the central plannin...Read more...

DARP Paper

Theil, Inequality and the Structure of Income Distribution,(published in Research on Economic Inequality, vol. 13 (2006), pp. 345-360).

Frank A Cowell

This paper documents the impact of Argentina's recent economic crises on different aspects of poverty, with a special focus on the economic collapse of 2002. We discuss the methodology of poverty measurement in Argentina...Read more...

DARP Paper

Perceptions of Risk: an Experimental Approach using Internet Questionnaires, (published in Research on Economic Inequality, vol. 12 (2004), pp. 99-132).

Frank A Cowell and Guillermo Cruces

Building on previous studies on perceptions of inequality, welfare and risk we investigate the structure of individuals' rankings of uncertain prospects in terms of risk and their relationship to individual preferences. ...Read more...

DARP Paper

Preference Reversals and the Analysis of Income Distributions

Yoram Amiel, Frank A Cowell, Leima Davidovitz and Avraham Polovin

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...Read more...

CASEpaper

Recent Changes in the Distribution of the Social Wage

Tom Sefton

This paper examines the distribution of the ¿social wage¿ benefits in kind from welfare services, including the National Health Service, state education, social housing, and personal social services. The current Governme...Read more...

DARP Paper

Sensitivity of Inequality Measures to Extreme Values, (published in Journal of Econometrics, vol. 141, (2007), pp. 1044-1072).

Frank A Cowell and Emmanuel Flachaire

We examine the sensitivity of estimates and inequality indices to extreme values, in the sense of their robustness properties and of their statistical performance. We establish that these measures are very sensitive to t...Read more...

DARP Paper

Measuring Inequality by Counting 'Complaints': Theory and Empirics, (published in Economics and Philosophy, vol. 19 (2003) pp. 241–263)

Kurt Devooght

This paper examines how people assess inequality of an income distribution and how inequality could be measured. We start from philosophical analysis of L Temkin who distinguishes nine plausible aspects of inequality. Hi...Read more...

Development Economics Paper

What Makes a Revolution?

Robert MacCulloch

Although property rights are the cornerstone of capitalist economics, throughout history existing claims have been frequently overturned and redefined by revolution. A fundamental question for economists is what makes re...Read more...

DARP Paper

Risk and Inequality Perceptions

Yoram Amiel and Frank A Cowell

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 di...Read more...

DARP Paper

Attitudes towards Risk and Inequality: A Questionnaire-Experimental Approach, (published in Experimental Economics: Financial Markets, Auctions, and Decision Making, Andersson, F. and Holm, H. J. (ed.), Kluwer, Dewenter (2002) Chapter 9, 85-115)

Yoram Amiel and Frank A Cowell

Orderings of income distribution in terms of inequality should be closely related to orderings in terms of risk. Using a novel mult-country questgionnaire experiment we examine the basis for this claim in terms of respon...Read more...

DARP Paper

Education, Inequality and Income Inequality

Daniele Checchi

In this paper we propose to measure inequality of educational achievements by constructing a Gini index on educational attainments. We then use the proposed measure to analyse the relationship between inequality in incom...Read more...

DARP Paper

A Note on the Estimation of Intergenerational Income Correlations by the Method of Averaging

Ramses H. Abul Naga

Averaging methods are routinely used in order to limit biases resulting from the mismeasurement of permanent incomes. The Solon/Zimmerman estimator regresses a single-year measurement of the child's resources on a T-peri...Read more...

DARP Paper

Decomposing Inequality in Greece: Results and Policy Implications

Christos Papatheodorou

This paper investigates the extent to which certain social characteristics and personal attributes could help explain income inequality in Greece. This analysis is quite revealing for understanding and explaining income ...Read more...

CASEpaper

Taxation for the Enabling State

John Hills

This paper takes as its starting point Henry Neuburger's injunction that taxation must be seen as a contribution to the maintenance of the welfare state, not as a dead-weight burden. It sets recent developments in the UK...Read more...

DARP Paper

Estimating Welfare Indices: Household Weights and Sample Design, (published in Research on Economic Inequality, vol. 9 (2002), pp. 147-172).

Frank A Cowell and Stephen P Jenkins

The techniques of simple random sampling are seldom appropriate in the empirical analysis of income distributions. Various types of weighting schemes are usually required either from the point of view of welfare-economic...Read more...

CASEpaper

Low Inequality with Low Redistribution? An analysis of income distribution in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan compared to Britain

Didier Jacobs

This article is a comparative analysis of the sources of income inequality in four countries, namely Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the United Kingdom. It relies upon decompositions of inequality measures by population g...Read more...

DARP Paper

Statistical Inference for Welfare under Complete and Incomplete Information, (published in Journal of Economic Inequality, vol. 1 (2003), pp. 191-219)

Frank A Cowell and Maria-Pia Victoria-Feser

We show how a collection of results in the literature on the empirical estimation of welfare indicators from sample data can be unified. We also demonstrate how some of these ideas can be extended to empirically importan...Read more...

DARP Paper

Choices in Egalitarian Distribution: Inequality Aversion versus Risk Aversion

Leima Davidovitz and Yoram Kroll

Inequality aversion and risk aversion are widely assumed features of economic models. But a review of the literature revealed that inequlity aversion and risk aversion are treated as separate variables. This paper presen...Read more...

DARP Paper

Measurement of Inequality (published in Handbook of Income Distribution, A B Atkinson and F Bourguignon (eds), 2000)

Frank A Cowell

The analysis of inequality is placed in the context of recent developments in economics and statistics. Prepated for Handbook of Income Distribution, edited by A B Atkinson and F Bourguignon....Read more...

DARP Paper

Inequality in Greece: An Analysis by Income Source

Christos Papatheodorou

This paper employs a decomposition analysis of inequality by income source to understand and explain particular aspects of income inequality in Greece. The results suggest that entrepreneurial income is the most signific...Read more...

DARP Paper

Education or Inflation? The Roles of Structural Factors and Macroeconomic Instability in Explaining Brazilian Inequality in the 1980s

Francisco H.G. Ferreira and Julie Litchfield

This paper investigates possible explanations for the increases in inequality observed in Brazil during the 1980s. While the static decompositions of inequality by household characteristics reveal that education and race...Read more...

DARP Paper

The Subjective Approach to the Measurement of Income Inequality (published in Handbook of Income Inequality Measurement, J Silber (ed), Kluwer Academic Publishers (1999), pp.227-241)

Yoram Amiel

Inequality measurement involves explicit or implicit value judgements. The subjective approach to inequality measurement is a relatively new and fast-developing area which focueses direct attention on these judgements. I...Read more...

DARP Paper

Linear Inequality Concepts and Social Welfare

Udo Ebert

The paper presents an abstract definition of linear inequality concepts leading to linearly invariant inequality measures and characterizes the class of linear concepts completely. Two general methods of deriving ethical...Read more...

DARP Paper

On the Performance of Social Benefit Systems

Christian Schluter

The paper analyses the performance of unemployment benefit systems in a search-theoretic framework. The criteria of evaluation comprise the alleviation of poverty and the reduction in income inequality, whilst the divers...Read more...

DARP Paper

Equivalence of Scales and Inequality (published in Income Inequality Measurement: From Theory to Practice, J Silber (ed), Dewenter: Kluwer (1999)

Frank A Cowell and Magda Mercader-Prats

Instead of Inequality analysis sometimes neglects the problem of allowing differences in people's non-income characteristics in the comparison of income distribution, I would say, At the heart of any distributional analy...Read more...

DARP Paper

Inequality, Welfare and Monotonicity

Yoram Amiel and Frank A Cowell

We establish a general relationship between the standard form of the individualistic social-welfare function and the ?reduced-form? version that is expressed in terms of inequality and mean income. This shows the relatio...Read more...

DARP Paper

Income Transformation and Income Inequality (published in Advances in Econometrics, Income Distribution & Scientific Methodology: Essays in Honour of Camilo Dagum, Daniel Slottje (ed)(Physica Verlag, 1999, pp.209-232)

Yoram Amiel and Frank A Cowell

We examine the way in which across-the-board additions to incomes are perceived to change inequality. Using a questionnaire we investigate whether subjective inequality rankings correspond to the principle of scale-indep...Read more...

DARP Paper

Estimation of Inequality Indices, (published in Income Inequality Measurement:From Theory to Practice, J Silber (ed), Dewenter: Kluwer 1999)

Frank A Cowell

Inequality measures are powerful tools of applied welfare analysis. However, to use the tools effectively one has to take into account the characteristics of the data with which one usually has to work. These raise a num...Read more...

DARP Paper

Workers or Employers: Who is Shaping Wage Inequality in Portugal?

Ana Rute Cardosa

An extensive micro data set matching firms, establishments and their employees, is used to study the determinants of earnings inequality in Portugal and its evolution from 1983 to 1992, with the Theil index, its decompos...Read more...

DARP Paper

Growing Apart: Inequality and Poverty Trends in Brazil in the 1980s

Francisco H.G. Ferreira and Julie Litchfield

This paper analyses the evolution of inequality and poverty in Brazil during the 1980s, using a large repeated cross-section household survey data set. We calculate standard scalar measures of inequality and poverty, tog...Read more...

DARP Paper

Modelling Income Distribution in Spain: A Robust Parametric Approach

Mercedes Prieto Alaiz and Maria-Pia Victoria-Feser

This paper presents a robust estimation of two income distribution models using Spanish data for the period 1990-91 under three different concepts of income. The effect on the estimates of the Theil index due to the choi...Read more...

DARP Paper

Family Instability, Family Incomes and Inequality

Frank A Cowell

When families reform there are implications for the income distribution through a number of economic mechanisms: income sharing, changes in household need, reweighting the distribution. These changes are distinct from th...Read more...

DARP Paper

Income Distribution and Inequality in Germany: Evidence from Panel Data

Christian Schluter

Non-parametric kernel density estimates are employed for an exploratory analysis of the distributional conseuqnces of the German tax-benefit system using GSOEP. The focuses is on the year 1991 and a detailed analysis is ...Read more...

DARP Paper

Income Distribution in Brazil 1981-1990: Parametric and Non-Parametric Approaches

Frank A Cowell, Francisco H.G. Ferreira and Julie Litchfield

Using a newly available comprehensive micro-data set we examine changes in the shape of the Brazilian income distribution during the 'lost decade' of the 1980s. We adopt alternative parametric and non-parametric approach...Read more...

Theoretical Economics Paper

Roads to Equality: Wealth Distribution Dynamics with Public-Private Capital Complementarity

Francisco H.G. Ferreira

This paper proposes a model of wealth distribution dynamics with a capital market imperfection and a production function where public capital is complementary to private capital. A unique invariant steady-state distribut...Read more...

DARP Paper

The Measurement of Poverty: An Experimental Questionnaire Investigation (published in Empirical Economics, vol.22 (1997), pp.571-588)

Yoram Amiel and Frank A Cowell

We re-examine some of the standard axioms used in the literature on Poverty Measurement. Using a sample of 486 students from Australia, Israel and the USA we investigate the extent to which perceptions of poverty corresp...Read more...

DARP Paper

Robustness properties of poverty indices, (Now published in European Economic Review, vol. 40 (1996), pp. 1761-1771)

Frank A Cowell and Maria-Pia Victoria-Feser

Drawing on recent work concerning the statistical robustness of inequality statistics we examine the sensitivity of poverty indices to data contamination using the concept of the influence function. We show that poverty ...Read more...

DARP Paper

How much inequality can we explain? A methodology and an application to the USA (Now published in The Economic Journal, vol.105, no.429 (March 1995), pp. 421-430)

Frank A Cowell and Stephen P Jenkins

We develop two simple measures of how much inequality is explained by individual population characteristics or groups of characteristics, analogous to R2 in regression analysis. We investigate the measures' empirical imp...Read more...

DARP Paper

Mixed dominance: a new criterion for poverty analysis

Stephen Howes

The second-order stochastic dominance criterion for inequality analysis introduced by Atkinson (1970) covers nearly all well-known inequality indices. The same cannot be said, in respect of poverty indices, for the secon...Read more...

DARP Paper

Robust estimation of personal income distribution models, (revised version published in The Canadian Journal of Statistics 22 (1994), pp. 247—258)

Maria-Pia Victoria-Feser

Statistical problems in modelling personal income distributions include estimation procedures, testing and model choice. Typically, the parameters of a given model are estimated by classical procedures such as maximum li...Read more...

DARP Paper

Robustness Properties of Inequality Measures: The Influence Function and the Principle of Transfers (Revised version in Econometrica, 64 (1996), pp.77-101)

Frank A Cowell and Maria-Pia Victoria-Feser

Inequality measures are often used to summarise information about empirical income distributions. However , the resulting picture of the distribution and of the changes in the distribution can be severely distorted if th...Read more...