Empirically Implementing a Social Welfare Inference Framework

Charles Beach () and Russell Davidson ()
Additional contact information
Russell Davidson: McGill University

No 1530, Working Paper from Economics Department, Queen's University

Abstract: This paper builds on recent econometric developments establishing distribution-free statistical inference methods for quantile means and income shares for a sample distribution of microdata to propose an approach to empirically Implement several dominance criteria for comparing economic well-being and general income inequality between distributions. It provides straightforward variance-covariance formulas in a set of practical empirical procedures for formally testing economic well-being and inequality comparisons such as rank dominance, Lorenz dominance and generalized Lorenz dominance between distributions.The tests and procedures are illustrated with Canadian census data between 2000 and 2020 on women's and men's incomes. It is found that both women's and men's economic well-being statistically significantly improved over this period, while income inequality significantly increased over 2000-15 and then fell over 2015-20.

Keywords: social welfare tests; income distribution comparisons; implementing social welfare (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C10 D31 D63 I31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 52 pages
Date: 2025-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ecm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econ.queensu.ca/sites/econ.queensu.ca/files/wpaper/qed_wp_1530.pdf First version 2025 (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:qed:wpaper:1530

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper from Economics Department, Queen's University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mark Babcock ().