Equivalence scales reconsidered ? an empirical investigation

Timm Bönke () and Carsten Schröder ()

No 2007,31, Economics Working Papers from Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel, Department of Economics

Abstract: Income-expenditure surveys typically provide incomes on the household level. As households can differ in size and needs, a reliable assessment of inequality in living standards, therefore, necessitates the conversion of the original heterogeneous into an artificial quasi-homogeneous population. Ebert and Moyes (2003) and Shorrocks (2004) theoretically explore the properties of two alternative conversion strategies: a weighting of household equivalent incomes by size and by needs. We use data from the Luxembourg Income Study for examining the sensitivity of the Gini and the Theil index to the chosen conversion strategy, and explain our results by means of an inequality decomposition by population subgroups.

Keywords: income distribution; inequality; inequality decomposition; equivalence scale (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I32 D63 D31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: Written

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10419/22047 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Equivalence scales reconsidered an empirical investigation (2007)
Working Paper: Equivalence scales reconsidered – an empirical investigation (2008)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:cauewp:6876

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Working Papers from Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel, Department of Economics
Series data maintained by ZBW - German National Library for Economics ().