Polarization measurement for ordinal data

Martyna Kobus

The Journal of Economic Inequality, 2015, vol. 13, issue 2, 275-297

Abstract: Atkinson’s Theorem (Atkinson J. Econ. Theory 2, 244–263, 1970) is a classic result in inequality measurement. It establishes Lorenz dominance as a useful criterion for comparative judgements of inequality between distributions. If distribution A Lorenz dominates distribution B, then all indices in a broad class of measures must confirm A as less unequal than B. Recent research, however, shows that standard inequality theory cannot be applied to ordinal data (Zheng Res. Econ. Inequal. 16, 177–188, 2008), such as self-reported health status or educational attainment. A new theory in development (Abul Naga and Yalcin J. Health Econ. 27(6), 1614–1625, 2008) measures disparity of ordinal data as polarization. Typically a criterion used to compare distributions is the polarization relation as proposed by Allison and Foster (J. Health Econ. 23(3), 505–524, 2004). We characterize classes of polarization measures equivalent to the AF relation analogously to Atkinson’s original approach. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015

Keywords: Polarization; Inequality measurement; Ordinal data; Atkinson’s Theorem; Dominance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (26)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10888-014-9282-y (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:jecinq:v:13:y:2015:i:2:p:275-297

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... th/journal/10888/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10888-014-9282-y

Access Statistics for this article

The Journal of Economic Inequality is currently edited by Stephen Jenkins

More articles in The Journal of Economic Inequality from Springer, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().