Stochastic Dominance Amongst Swedish Income Distributions
Almas Heshmati () and
Esfandiar Maasoumi
No 279, SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance from Stockholm School of Economics
Abstract:
Sweden's income distribution for the whole population and for subgroups, including its immigrants, has been extensively studied. The interest in this area has grown with increasing availability of data, including panels. The previous studies are based on indices of inequality or mobility. While indices are useful for complete ordering and have an air of "decisiveness" about them, they lack universal acceptance of the value judgements inherent to the welfare functions that underlay all indices. In contrast, uniform partial order relations are studied in this paper which rank welfare situations over very wide classes of welfare functions. We conduct bootstrap tests for the existence of first and second order stochastic dominance amongst Sweden's income distributions over time and for several subgroups of immigrants. Analysis of immigrant's income is motivated by the fact that the development of income for immigrants has been different and strongly affected by their length of residence and countries of origin. We consider eleven waves of a panel of incomes in Sweden. Two income definitions are developed. One is pre-transfers and taxes gross income, the other is a post-transfers and taxes disposable income. The comparison of the distribution of these two variables affords a partial view of Sweden's welfare system. We have focused on the incomes of Swede's and immigrant groups of single individuals identified by country of origin, length of residence, age, education, gender, marital status and other relevant characteristics. We find that first order dominance is rare, but second order relation holds in several cases.
Keywords: Sweden; Immigrants; Optimal policy; Stochastic Dominance; Lorenz Curves; Bootstrap; Income Distribution; Nonparametric Testing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 D63 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 1998-11-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)
Published in Econometric Reviews, 2000, pages 287-320.
There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.
Related works:
Journal Article: Stochastic dominance amongst swedish income distributions (2000) 
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:hhs:hastef:0279
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance from Stockholm School of Economics The Economic Research Institute, Stockholm School of Economics, P.O. Box 6501, 113 83 Stockholm, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Helena Lundin ().