IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/inq/inqwps/ecineq2020-516.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Opportunity advantage: a new approach to comparing income distributions

Author

Listed:
  • Carmen Herrero

    (University of Alicante)

  • Antonio Villar

    (Pablo de Olavide University)

Abstract

This paper proposes a new approach to the comparison of income distributions based on the notion of opportunity advantage. This is a measure of how likely is that a representative individual of a society gets a higher income than that of another. Opportunity advantage can be regarded as the evaluation of the income opportunities that a society offers to an individual, relative to other societies, from the O`veil of ignoranceO? viewpoint. We show that this notion can be given a precise formalization which results in a complete, transitive and cardinal evaluation of income opportunity. The evaluation so obtained describes the willingness to stay in a society relative to move somewhere else. We provide an empirical application to the analysis of the economic recovery in Spain and its regions. The results show that this criterion offers new insights on the impact of the crisis on households.

Suggested Citation

  • Carmen Herrero & Antonio Villar, 2020. "Opportunity advantage: a new approach to comparing income distributions," Working Papers 516, ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality.
  • Handle: RePEc:inq:inqwps:ecineq2020-516
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.ecineq.org/milano/WP/ECINEQ2020-516.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Joan Esteban & Carlos Gradín & Debraj Ray, 2007. "An Extension of a Measure of Polarization, with an application to the income distribution of five OECD countries," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 5(1), pages 1-19, April.
    2. Rothschild, Michael & Stiglitz, Joseph E., 1973. "Some further results on the measurement of inequality," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 6(2), pages 188-204, April.
    3. John E. Roemer & Alain Trannoy, 2016. "Equality of Opportunity: Theory and Measurement," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 54(4), pages 1288-1332, December.
    4. Carmen Herrero & Antonio Villar, 2018. "The Balanced Worth: A Procedure to Evaluate Performance in Terms of Ordered Attributes," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 140(3), pages 1279-1300, December.
    5. Carmen Herrero & Antonio Villar, 2013. "On the Comparison of Group Performance with Categorical Data," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 8(12), pages 1-7, December.
    6. Dasgupta, Partha & Sen, Amartya & Starrett, David, 1973. "Notes on the measurement of inequality," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 6(2), pages 180-187, April.
    7. Angus Deaton & Salman Zaidi, 2002. "Guidelines for Constructing Consumption Aggregates for Welfare Analysis," World Bank Publications, The World Bank, number 14101, April.
    8. Dirk Krueger & Fabrizio Perri, 2006. "Does Income Inequality Lead to Consumption Inequality? Evidence and Theory -super-1," Review of Economic Studies, Oxford University Press, vol. 73(1), pages 163-193.
    9. Shorrocks, Anthony F, 1983. "Ranking Income Distributions," Economica, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 50(197), pages 3-17, February.
    10. Sen, Amartya, 1973. "On Economic Inequality," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780198281931, Decembrie.
    11. Vito Peragine, 2004. "Measuring and implementing equality of opportunity for income," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 22(1), pages 187-210, February.
    12. Villar Antonio, 2005. "On the Welfare Evaluation of Income and Opportunity," The B.E. Journal of Theoretical Economics, De Gruyter, vol. 5(1), pages 1-21, June.
    13. Mike Brewer & Cormac O'Dea, 2012. "Measuring living standards with income and consumption: evidence from the UK," IFS Working Papers W12/12, Institute for Fiscal Studies.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Karsu, Özlem & Morton, Alec, 2015. "Inequity averse optimization in operational research," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 245(2), pages 343-359.
    2. Carbonell-Nicolau, Oriol & Llavador, Humberto, 2018. "Inequality reducing properties of progressive income tax schedules: the case of endogenous income," Theoretical Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 13(1), January.
    3. WANG, Zuxiang & SMYTH, Russell & NG, Yew-Kwang, 2009. "A new ordered family of Lorenz curves with an application to measuring income inequality and poverty in rural China," China Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 20(2), pages 218-235, June.
    4. Laurent Derobert & Guillaume Thieriot, 2003. "The Lorenz curve as an archetype: A historico-epistemological study," The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 10(4), pages 573-585.
    5. Francesco Andreoli & Claudio Zoli, 2020. "From unidimensional to multidimensional inequality: a review," METRON, Springer;Sapienza Università di Roma, vol. 78(1), pages 5-42, April.
    6. Satya R. Chakravarty & Amita Majumder & Sonali Roy, 2007. "A Treatment Of Absolute Indices Of Polarization," The Japanese Economic Review, Japanese Economic Association, vol. 58(2), pages 273-293, June.
    7. Nicolas Gravel & Patrick Moyes, 2013. "Utilitarianism or welfarism: does it make a difference?," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 40(2), pages 529-551, February.
    8. Claudio Zoli, 2002. "Inverse stochastic dominance, inequality measurement and Gini indices," Journal of Economics, Springer, vol. 77(1), pages 119-161, December.
    9. Fischer, Ronald D, 1992. "Income Distribution in the Dynamic Two-Factor Trade Model," Economica, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 59(234), pages 221-233, May.
    10. Alain Trannoy & John Weymark, 2007. "Dominance Criteria for Critical-Level Generalized Utilitarianism," Vanderbilt University Department of Economics Working Papers 0707, Vanderbilt University Department of Economics.
    11. Gian Maria Tomat, 2014. "Revisiting poverty and welfare dominance," ECONOMIA PUBBLICA, FrancoAngeli Editore, vol. 2014(2), pages 125-149.
    12. Louis Kaplow, 2005. "Why measure inequality?," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 3(1), pages 65-79, April.
    13. William Cavendish, 1999. "Poverty, inequality and environmental resources: quantitative analysis of rural households," Economics Series Working Papers WPS/1999-09, University of Oxford, Department of Economics.
    14. Fabio Maccheroni & Pietro Muliere & Claudio Zoli, 2005. "Inverse stochastic orders and generalized Gini functionals," Metron - International Journal of Statistics, Dipartimento di Statistica, Probabilità e Statistiche Applicate - University of Rome, vol. 0(3), pages 529-559.
    15. HÖLSCH Katja, 2002. "The effect of social transfers in Europe: An empirical analysis using generalised Lorenz curves," IRISS Working Paper Series 2002-02, IRISS at CEPS/INSTEAD.
    16. Ok, Efe A. & Lambert, Peter J., 1999. "On evaluating social welfare by sequential generalized Lorenz dominance," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 63(1), pages 45-53, April.
    17. Kaynar, Nur & Karsu, Özlem, 2018. "Equitable decision making approaches over allocations of multiple benefits to multiple entities," Omega, Elsevier, vol. 81(C), pages 85-98.
    18. Madden, Paul, 1996. "Suppes-Sen dominance, generalised Lorenz dominance and the welfare economics of competitive equilibrium: Some examples," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 61(2), pages 247-262, August.
    19. Karsu, Özlem & Morton, Alec & Argyris, Nikos, 2018. "Capturing preferences for inequality aversion in decision support," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 264(2), pages 686-706.
    20. Allanson, Paul & Hubbard, Lionel, 1999. "On the Comparative Evaluation of Agricultural Income Distributions in the European Union," European Review of Agricultural Economics, Foundation for the European Review of Agricultural Economics, vol. 26(1), pages 1-17, March.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    KEYWORDS KEYWORDS.;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:inq:inqwps:ecineq2020-516. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Maria Ana Lugo (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ecineea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.