The study of social welfare and income inequality is one of enduring importance in economics and the wider social sciences. Defining and measuring these concepts has been a concern of many prominent economists for over a century. Perhaps the best known and widely used inequality measure is the Gini coefficient introduced by Corrado Gini in 1912, which is currently used by the World Bank and United Nations to track variations in inequalities across countries and over time. More recently, many new and better data sources have become available. Coincidentally powerful new econometric methodologies have been developed that allow inequality to be studied empirically in greater detail using more comprehensive measures.
The Econometrics Journal organized a Special Session on Econometrics of Inequality at the RES Annual Conference 2010 which was held at the University of Surrey. Papers were presented by Stephen Donald (University of Texas at Austin) and Russell Davidson (McGill University). Christian Schluter (Southampton University) was the discussant.
Royal Economic Society Annual Conference 2010 Special Issue on Econometrics of Inequality (PDF 35Kb)
Incorporating Covariates in the Measurement of Welfare and Inequality: Methods and Applications (PDF, 524Kb)
Stephen G. Donald, Yu-Chin Hsu, Garry F. Barrett
Statistical Inference in the Presence of Heavy Tails (PDF 454Kb)
Russell Davidson
The Econometrics of Inequality Measurement (PDF 152Kb)
Christian Schluter
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