Inequality, Entropy and Goodness of Fit

Frank Cowell (), Emmanuel Flachaire and Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay ()

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: Specific functional forms are often used in economic models of distributions; goodness-of-fit measures are used to assess whether a functional form is appropriate in the light of real-world data. Standard approaches use a distance criterion based on the EDF, an aggregation of differences in observed and theoretical cumulative frequencies. However, an economic approach to the problem should involve a measure of the information loss from using a badly-fitting model. This would involve an aggregation of, for example, individual income discrepancies between model and data. We provide an axiomatisation of an approach and applications to illustrate its importance.

Keywords: goodness of fit; discrepancy; income distribution; inequality measurement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-05-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ltv
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00591077
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00591077/document (application/pdf)

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:hal:wpaper:halshs-00591077

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().