Modelling Income Distribution

This volume collects contemporary research on modelling income distribution and redistribution by Creedy and a number of other contributors. It opens with the main results of a research programme on distributional modelling using the generalized exponential family. It argues that the major advantages of this family are its flexiblility, particularly in handling multimodality, and the explicit link with structural demand-and-supply models. The book then goes on to discuss research on the effects of macroeconomic variables, particularly unemployment and inflation, on the personal distribution. The use of the generalized exponential family in this context is explored, as well as the use of mixture distributions. Finally, income distribution is examined in depth. This includes work on decomposing the redistribution effects of taxes into vertical, horizontal and reranking effects. The final chapters explore the Bayesian estimation of a range of social welfare, inequality and tax progressivity measures. Posterior distributions of the measures are obtained. This volume should be of interest to academics and researchers with an interest in welfare economics and econometric theory.