The most limiting weakness of the human development index (HDI) is that it looks only at average achievements and does not take into account the distribution of human development within a country or population subgroups. All previous attempts to capture inequality in the HDI have also used aggregate information and there exists no HDI at the household level. This paper provides a method and ill...

Growing interest in inequality has generated an outpouring of scholarly research and has brought many discussions on the subject into the public realm. Surprisingly, most of these studies and discussions rely on a narrow set of indicators to measure inequality. Most of the time a single summary measure of inequality is considered: the Gini coefficient. This is surprising not only because there ...

This paper explores a natural decomposition property motivated by Shorrocks (1980, Econometrica 48, 613 625) and Anand (1983, ``Inequality and poverty in Malaysia,'' Oxford University Press) that we call path independent decomposability. Between-group inequality is found by applying the inequality measure to the smoothed distribution, which replaces each income in a subgroup with its representa...

We show that search frictions can be the source of increasing returns to scale (IRS) that brings people together in big cities. We develop a model of an economy with several regions, which differ in scale. Within each region, workers have to search for a job-type that matches their skill. They face a trade-off between match quality and the cost of extended search. This trade-off differs between...

This paper discusses the implications of the decomposition property of the Theil index in sequences of nested and hierarchic grouping structures, formalizing general results applicable to a generic sequence of grouping structures. A specific application to data on wages and employment by industrial classification to measure the evolution of wage inequality through time will be explored, analyzi...

This paper discusses the dynamic properties of generalized entropy measures of inequality, deriving an explicit expression linking changes in inequality with changes in the growth income. This establishes a time-wise decomposition for the family of generalized entropy measures of inequality, showing that the rate of change in the distribution of income can be divided into two parts. One is pure...

While software metrics are commonly used to assess software maintainability and study software evolution, they are usually defined on a micro-level (method, class, package). Metrics should therefore be aggregated in order to provide insights in the evolution at the macro-level (system). In addition to traditional aggregation techniques such as the mean, recently econometric aggregation techniqu...

The paper examines the linkages between gender of household heads, education and household poverty in Nigeria between 1980 and 1996. Data analyzed were obtained from four national consumer expenditure surveys conducted in Nigeria in 1980, 1985, 1992 and 1996 by the Federal Office of Statistics. Adjustments were made for price differentials over time and across regions of the country. However, o...

The Theil index is much used in economy and finance; it looks like the Shannon entropy, but pertains to event values rather than to their probabilities. Any time series can be remapped through the Theil index. Correlation coefficients can be evaluated between the new time series, thereby allowing to study their mutual statistical distance, to be contrasted to the usual correlation distance meas...

Tornqvist-Theil indexes of outputs and inputs are constructed. These data are used to construct indexes of productivity growth over the postwar period. The productivity indexes can be derived from a flexible multioutput-multifactor representation of the structure of production constrained to constant returns to scale. Total factor productivity grew at an average annual rate of 1.75%, compared w...