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Journal ArticleDOI

On the Measurement of Inequality

01 Sep 1970-Journal of Economic Theory (Academic Press)-Vol. 2, Iss: 3, pp 244-263
TL;DR: In this paper, the problem of comparing two frequency distributions f(u) of an attribute y which for convenience I shall refer to as income is defined as a risk in the theory of decision-making under uncertainty.
About: This article is published in Journal of Economic Theory.The article was published on 1970-09-01. It has received 5002 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Income inequality metrics & Income distribution.
Citations
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors synthesize and test explanations of how public sector size and democracy affect income inequality, based on unbalanced panel data for 64 developing and developed countries in the world.
Abstract: This study synthesizes and tests explanations of how public sector size and democracy affect income inequality. The results, based on unbalanced panel data for 64 developing and developed countries...

140 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, a re-analysis of Wright and Ermisch's (1991) study of earnings discrimination by gender based on the 1980 UK Women and Employment Survey is presented.

138 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors assess three widely discussed proposals for leakage reduction: carbon-motivated border tax adjustments, industry exemptions from carbon regulation, and output-based allocation of emission allowances, and find that none of these measures amounts to a "magic bullet" when both efficiency and equity criteria matter.

138 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
Ian Jewitt1
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors consider expected utility maximizers choosing from a family of risky prospects and examine how choice is influenced by the decision makers attitude to risk, i.e., as decision makers are more risk tolerant they choose a gamble higher in the ordering.
Abstract: We consider expected utility maximizers choosing from a family of risky prospects and examine how choice is influenced by the decision makers attitude to risk. If the family of risky prospects can be ordered so that as decision makers are more risk tolerant they choose a gamble higher in the ordering, then it is natural to say that the family of risky prospects admit a comparative static result. The paper characterizes when comparative static results of this sort exist. An application is to propose a criterion of location independent riskiness.

138 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper analyzed the relationship between education and wage inequality in metropolitan Brazil and found that the differences in wage inequality were intrinsically associated with differences in the steepness of the wage-education profiles.

138 citations

References
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, a measure of risk aversion in the small, the risk premium or insurance premium for an arbitrary risk, and a natural concept of decreasing risk aversion are discussed and related to one another.
Abstract: This paper concerns utility functions for money. A measure of risk aversion in the small, the risk premium or insurance premium for an arbitrary risk, and a natural concept of decreasing risk aversion are discussed and related to one another. Risks are also considered as a proportion of total assets.

5,207 citations

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1,748 citations


"On the Measurement of Inequality" refers background in this paper

  • ...3 See Rothschild and Stiglitz [13], Hadar and Russell [ 5 ], and Hanoch and Levy [6]....

    [...]

Journal ArticleDOI

1,738 citations


"On the Measurement of Inequality" refers methods in this paper

  • ...Then by applying the results of Pratt [l 11, Arrow [ 2 ], and others, we can see that this requirement (which may be referred to as constant (relative) inequality-aversion) implies that U(y) has the form...

    [...]

Journal ArticleDOI
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1,544 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, an analysis of the first step of the decision-making process of an individual decision maker among alternative risky ventures is presented, in terms of a single dimension such as money, both for the utility functions and for the probability distributions.
Abstract: Publisher Summary The choice of an individual decision maker among alternative risky ventures may be regarded as a two-step procedure. The decision maker chooses an efficient set among all available portfolios, independently of his tastes or preferences. Then, the decision maker applies individual preferences to this set to choose the desired portfolio. The subject of this chapter is the analysis of the first step. It deals with optimal selection rules that minimize the efficient set by discarding any portfolio that is inefficient in the sense that it is inferior to a member of the efficient set, from point of view of each and every individual, when all individuals' utility functions are assumed to be of a given general class of admissible functions. The analysis presented in the chapter is carried out in terms of a single dimension such as money, both for the utility functions and for the probability distributions. However, the results may easily be extended, with minor changes in the theorems and the proofs, to the multivariate case. The chapter explains a necessary and sufficient condition for efficiency, when no further restrictions are imposed on the utility functions. It presents proofs of the optimal efficiency criterion in the presence of general risk aversion, that is, for concave utility functions.

1,160 citations