infonet-economy

Explaining why the German speaking Swiss were so reluctant about joining the European Economic Area and the French German speaking were so enthusiastic.

Statistical problems in modelling personal income distributions include estimation procedures, testing, and model choice. Typically, the parameters of a given model are estimated by classical procedures such as maximum likelihood and leastsquares estimators. Unfortunately, the classical methods are very sensitive to model deviations such as gross errors in the data, grouping effects...

Inequality measures are often used fot summarise information about empirical income distributions. However, the resulting picture of the distribution and of changes in the distribution can be severely distorted if the data are contaminated. The nature of this distortion will in general depend upon the underlying properties of the inequality measure. We investigate this issue...