infonet-economy

This paper seeks to explain differential participation in social movements. It does so by attempting to bridge structural-level and individual-level explanations. We test a number of hypotheses drawn from the social networks and the rationalist perspectives on individual engagement by means of survey data on members of a major organization of the Swiss solidarity movement. Both...

Lorenz curves and second-order dominance criteria are known to be sensitive to data contamination in the right tail of the distribution. We propose two ways of dealing with the problem: (1) Estimate Lorenz curves using parametric models for income distributions, and (2) Combine empirical estimation with a parametric (robust) estimation of the upper tail of the distribution using the...

By starting from a natural class of robust estimators for generalized linear models based on the notion of quasi-likelihood, we define robust deviances that can be used for stepwise model selection as in the classical framework. We derive the asymptotic distribution of tests based on robust deviances, and we investigate the stability of their asymptotic level under contamination. The...

Distributional dominance criteria are commonly applied to draw welfare inferences about comparisons, but conclusions drawn from empirical implementations of dominance criteria may be inßuenced by data contamination. We examine a non-parametric approach to reÞning Lorenz-type comparisons and apply the technique to two important examples from the LIS data-base.