Intersecting Lorenz curves and aversion to inverse downside inequality

W. Henry Chiu ()
Additional contact information
W. Henry Chiu: University of Manchester

Social Choice and Welfare, 2021, vol. 56, issue 3, No 3, 487-508

Abstract: Abstract This paper defines and characterizes the concept of an increase in inverse downside inequality and show that, when the Lorenz curves of two income distributions intersect, how the change from one distribution to the other is judged by an inequality index exhibiting inverse downside inequality aversion often depends on the relative strengths of its aversion to inverse downside inequality and inequality aversion. For the class of linear inequality indices, of which the Gini coefficient is a member, a measure characterizing the strength of an index’s aversion to inverse downside inequality against its own inequality aversion is shown to determine the ranking by the index of two distributions whose Lorenz curves cross once. The precise condition under which the same result generalizes to the case of multiple-crossing Lorenz curves is also identified.

Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s00355-020-01288-6 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:sochwe:v:56:y:2021:i:3:d:10.1007_s00355-020-01288-6

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... c+theory/journal/355

DOI: 10.1007/s00355-020-01288-6

Access Statistics for this article

Social Choice and Welfare is currently edited by Bhaskar Dutta, Marc Fleurbaey, Elizabeth Maggie Penn and Clemens Puppe

More articles in Social Choice and Welfare from Springer, The Society for Social Choice and Welfare Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().