Providing basic foundations for measuring inequality
from the perspective of distributional properties
This monograpg reviews a set of widely used summary inequality measures, and the lesser known relative distribution method provides the basic rationale behind each measure and discusses their interconnections. It also introduces model-based decomposition of inequality over time using quantile regression. This approach enables researchers to estimate two different contributions to changes in inequality between two time points.
Key Features
- Clear statistical explanations provide fundamental statistical basis for understanding the new modeling framework
- Straightforward empirical examples reinforce statistical knowledge and ready-to-use procedures
- Multiple approaches to assessing inequality are introduced by starting with the basic distributional property and providing connections among approaches
This supplementary text is appropriate for any graduate-level, intermediate, or advanced statistics course across the social and behavioral sciences, as well as individual researchers.
Inhoudsopgave
1. Introduction
2. PDFs, CDFs, Quantile Functions, and Lorenz Curves
3. Summary Inequality Measures
4. Choices of Inequality Measures
5. Relative Distribution Methods
6. Inference Issues
7. Analyzing Inequality Trends
8. An Illustrative Application: Inequality in Income and Wealth in the United States, 1991 – 2001
REFERENCES
Over de auteur
Daniel Q. Naiman (Ph D, Mathematics, 1982, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) is Professor and Chair of the Applied Mathematics and Statistics at the Johns Hopkins University. He was elected as a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 1997, and was an Erskine Fellow at the University of Canterbury in 2005. Much of his mathematical research has been focused on geometric and computational methods for multiple testing. He has collaborated on papers applying statistics in a variety of areas: bioinformatics, econometrics, environmental health, genetics, hydrology, and microbiology. His articles have appeared in various journals including Annals of Statistics, Bioinformatics, Biometrika, Human Heredity, Journal of Multivariate Analysis, Journal of the American Statistical Association, and Science.