We derive the asymptotic sampling distribution of various estimators frequently used to order distributions in terms of poverty, welfare and inequality. This includes estimators of most of the poverty indices currently in use, as well as estimators of the curves used to infer stochastic dominance of any order. These curves can be used to determine whether poverty, inequality or social welfare is greater in one distribution than in another for general classes of indices. We also derive the sampling distribution of the maximal poverty lines (or income censoring thresholds) up to which we may con dently assert that poverty or social welfare is greater in one distribution than in another. The sampling distribution of convenient estimators for dual approaches to the measurement ofpoverty is also established. The

Libre (free, open source) software is one of the paradigmatic cases where heavy use of telematic tools and userdriven software development are key points. This paper proposes a methodology for measuring and analyzing remotely big libre software projects using publicly-available data from their version control repositories. By means of a tool called CVSAnalY that has been implemented following this methodology, measurements and analyses can be made in an automatic and non-intrusive way, providing real-time and historical data about the project and its contributors.

When mining a large database, the number of patterns discovered can easily exceed the capabilities of a human user to identify interesting results. To address this problem, various techniques have been suggested to reduce and/or order the patterns prior to presenting them to the user. In this paper, our focus is on ranking summaries generated from a single dataset, where attributes can be generalized in many different ways and to many levels of granularity according to taxonomic hierarchies. We theoretically and empirically evaluate thirteen diversity measures used as heuristic measures of interestingness for ranking summaries generated from databases. The thirteen diversity measures have previously been utilized in various disciplines, such as information theory, statistics, ecology, and economics. We describe five principles that any measure must satisfy to be considered useful for ranking summaries. Theoretical results show that only four of the thirteen diversity measures satisfy all of the principles. We then analyze the distribution of the index values generated by each of the thirteen diversity measures. Empirical results, obtained using synthetic data, show that the distribution of index values generated tend to be highly skewed about the mean, median, and middle index values. The objective of this work is to gain some insight into the behaviour that can be expected from each of the measures in practice. 1

If individuals care about their status, defined as their rank in the distribution of consumption of one “positional ” good, then the consumer’s problem is strategic as her utility depends on the consumption choices of others. In the symmetric Nash equilibrium, each individual spends an inefficientlyhighamountonthe status good. Using techniques from auction theory, we analyze the effects of exogenous changes in the distribution of income. In a richer society, almost all individuals spend more on conspicuous consumption, and individual utility is lower at each income level. In a more equal society, the poor are worse off.

We examine properties of a model of resource allocation in which several agents exchange resources in order to optimise their individual holdings. The schemes discussed relate to well-known negotiation protocols proposed in earlier work and we consider a number of alternative notions of "rationality" covering both quantitative measures, e.g. cooperative and individual rationality and more qualitative forms, e.g. Pigou-Dalton transfers. While it is known that imposing particular rationality and structural restrictions on the form of exchanges may render these unable to realise every reallocation of the resource set, in this paper we address the issue of the number of restricted rational exchanges that may be required to implement a particular reallocation when it is possible to do so. We construct examples showing that this number may be exponential (in the number of resources m), even when all of the agent utility functions are monotonic. We further show that k agents may achieve in a single exchange a reallocation requiring exponentially many rational exchanges if at most k 1 agents can participate, this same reallocation being unrealisable by any sequences of rational exchanges in which at most k 2 agents are involved.

: One of the main concerns of Latin Americans today is the lack of adequate employment opportunities. This concern is based on the widespread perception that not enough employment is being generated, and that few individuals have access to well-remunerated jobs. This work asks whether there is a supply-side story to be told about these outcomes. We present stylized facts about the connection between the demographic transition and changes in education (the size and quality of the labor force), with labor supply, inequality, and unemployment. The main conclusion is that demographics and education significantly improve our understanding on the overall decline in employment, the changing pattern of unemployment, and the rise in wage inequality. By adding them to the demand and institutional factors behind these outcomes, we obtain a clearer picture about labor markets in Latin America. Although demographics and education move slowly through time and have a strong inertial component, there ...

We estimate the world distribution of income by integrating individual income distributions for 125 countries between 1970 and 1998. We estimate poverty rates and headcounts by integrating the density function below the $1/day and $2/day poverty lines. We find that poverty rates decline substantially over the last twenty years. We compute poverty headcounts and find that the number of one-dollar poor declined by 235 million between 1976 and 1998. The number of $2/day poor declined by 450 million over the same period. We analyze poverty across different regions and countries. Asia is a great success, especially after 1980. Latin America reduced poverty substantially in the 1970s but progress stopped in the 1980s and 1990s. The worst performer was Africa, where poverty rates increased substantially over the last thirty years: the number of $1/day poor in Africa increased by 175 million between 1970 and 1998, and the number of $2/day poor increased by 227. Africa hosted 11 % of the world’s poor in 1960. It hosted 66 % of them in 1998. We estimate seven indexes of income inequality implied by our world distribution of income. All of them show substantial reductions in global income inequality during the 1980s and 1990s.

We propose a new class of mobility measures which we call “measures of distributional difference.” Members of this new class measure mobility as integrated weighted distributional difference. We demonstrate that many leading measures of mobility proposed in the literature are members of this class. Our approach therefore permits a considerable unification of a diverse literature. Moreover, our tools enable us to make explicit the implicit weighting properties of leading members of this class whose original forms do not lend themselves to such an analysis. This leads us to question the attractiveness of some popular mobility indices.

This work assesses the changes in aggregate poverty and inequality that have taken place in Latin America during the past 26 years. With this objective, we put together the largest number of observations on income distribution for the region for the period 1970-1995. We find that poverty and inequality have not declined during the 1990s in spite of improvements at the macroeconomic level. The characteristics of our data allow us to perform various comparisons between countries. Our results show that even though there are differences in levels across countries, inequality and poverty in most of them follow similar trends during the period under study.

Bitler gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the National Institute on Aging. This work has not been formally reviewed or edited. The views and conclusions are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those fo the RAND Corporation. We are very grateful to MDRC for providing the public access to the experimental data used here. The data used in this paper are derived from data files made available to researchers by MDRC. The authors remain solely responsible for how the data have been used or interpreted. We would also like to thank Mary Daly, Guido Imbens, Lorien Rice, and Jeff Smith for helpful conversations, as well as seminar