Papers by Gordon Anderson
Journal of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry, 2012
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The Canadian income distribution is a mixture of many very different constituent income distribut... more The Canadian income distribution is a mixture of many very different constituent income distributions, Aboriginal–non-Aboriginal, Male–Female, Urban–Rural. In part, the extent to which they differ reflects the Inequity of Life Chances across those various constituencies, which has long been one focus of the Canadian political agenda. A core component of the equal opportunity imperative is that, conditional on circumstance and effort, each and all should have the same opportunity for income. Assuming innate efforts and abilities are commonly distributed across those constituencies, measuring the extent of "inequality of opportunity" is a matter of measuring the manner and extent to which constituent income distributions are unequal. This task is somewhat obfuscated by the counterintuitive fact (illuminated by a subgroup decomposition of the Gini coefficient) that a collection of distributions can simultaneously become more (less) equal and more (less) polarized. Thus,...
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Journal of Econometrics, 1987
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A major impediment to poverty evaluation in environments with a multiplicity of wellbeing indicat... more A major impediment to poverty evaluation in environments with a multiplicity of wellbeing indicators is the difficulty associated with formulating a poverty frontier in many dimensions. This paper proposes two multivariate relative polarization measures which, in appropriate circumstances, serve as multi-variate poverty measures which do not require computation of a poverty frontier. As poverty measures they have the intuitive appeal of reflecting the degree to which poor and non-poor societies are polarized. (The measures would also have considerable application in studying multivariate conver-gence issues in economic growth models.) The measures are exemplified in a poor–non-poor country study over the period 1990–2005, based upon the joint distribution of per capita GNP and Life Expectancy. The results suggest that as a group, the world’s poor are experiencing diminished poverty polarization; however, within the world’s poor the African nations are experiencing increased poverty ...
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Journal of Economic Growth, 2016
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Parallel Sessions C: Applications of Stochastic Dominance Comparisons
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The notion of Equality of Opportunity (EO) has pervaded much of economic and social justice polic... more The notion of Equality of Opportunity (EO) has pervaded much of economic and social justice policy and research over the last half century. The sense that differences in agent outcomes that are the consequence of their individual choice and effort are acceptable, whereas variation in agent outcomes that are the consequence of circumstances beyond their control are not has underpinned much gender, race, education and family law and policy over that period, making it a many dimensioned issue. Here a new approach to evaluating levels of and changes in EO which readily accommodates these many dimensions is introduced and progress in the extent of equality of opportunity in the United States is studied over the period 1960-2000. The evidence is that gains were made in all categories throughout the period, more so for boys than girls (though girls were better off in an EO sense to start with), more so for children in single parent In recent years there has been considerable interest among...
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SSRN Electronic Journal, 2017
For ranking incomparable prospects, a ‘Utopia Index’ measuring the proximity to a lower envel... more For ranking incomparable prospects, a ‘Utopia Index’ measuring the proximity to a lower envelope of the integrated distribution functions is proposed which can be interpreted as a locus of optimal satisfaction levels for a range of permitted preferences. The exact limit distribution for the empirical counterpart of the index for a general class of dynamic processes is derived together with a feasible test procedures based on bootstrapping techniques. There are a wide variety of potential applications wherein classical dominance techniques fail to yield definitive conclusions. To illustrate, an empirical application to Chinese household income data shows how the well-being of cohorts impacted by the vagaries of Era’s before, during and after the Cultural Revolution can be ranked in the absence of a dominance relationship and an application to historical investment returns data shows that, depending on the investment universe, investing in small value stocks or small winner stocks is ranked above all alternative strategies.
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The Economic Journal, 1984
Recent studies in empirical demand analysis have focussed much attention on the choice of a suita... more Recent studies in empirical demand analysis have focussed much attention on the choice of a suitable maintained framework within which restrictions on consumer behaviour may be examined. The development of dynamic generalisations of the traditional static models has been a dominant feature of this work as is reflected in the studies by Anderson and Blundell (1982, 1983), Attfield and Browning (1983), Muellbauer (1982), Muellbauer and Pashardes (1982), Phlips (1972), Pollak and Wales (1982) and Ray (1983). Motivation for such ...
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Review of Income and Wealth, 2005
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Economica, 1978
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Poverty measurement and the analysis of the progress (or otherwise) of the poor is beset with dif... more Poverty measurement and the analysis of the progress (or otherwise) of the poor is beset with difficulties and controversies surrounding the definition of a poverty line or frontier. Here, using ideas from the partial identification literature and mixture models, a new approach to poverty measurement is proposed which avoids specifying a frontier, the price is that an agent’s poverty status is only partially identified. Invoking variants of Gibrat’s law to give structure to the distribution of outcomes for homogeneous subgroups of a population within the context of a finite mixture model of societal outcomes facilitates calculation of the probability of an agent’s poverty status. From this it is straightforward to calculate all the usual poverty measures as well as other characteristics of the poor and non poor subgroups in a society. These ideas are exemplified in a study of 47 countries in Africa over the recent quarter century which reveals among other things a growing poverty ra...
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Econometrics Journal, 2021
Multilateral comparison of outcomes drawn from multiple groups pervade the social sciences and me... more Multilateral comparison of outcomes drawn from multiple groups pervade the social sciences and measurement of their variability, usually involving functions of respective group location and scale parameters, is of intrinsic interest. However, such approaches frequently mask more fundamental differences that more comprehensive examination of relative group distributional structures reveal. Indeed, in categorical data contexts, location and scale based techniques are no longer feasible without artificial and questionable cardinalization of categories. Here, Ginis’ Transvariation measure is extended and employed in providing quantitative and visual multilateral comparison tools in discrete, continuous, categorical, univariate or multivariate settings which are particularly useful in paradigms where cardinal measure is absent. Two applications, one analyzing Eurozone cohesion in terms of the convergence or divergence of constituent nations income distributions, the other, drawn from a s...
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Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series C (Applied Statistics)
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Poverty measurement and the analysis of the progress (or otherwise) of the poor is beset with dif... more Poverty measurement and the analysis of the progress (or otherwise) of the poor is beset with difficulties and controversies surrounding the definition of a poverty line or frontier. Here, using ideas from the partial identification literature and mixture models, a new approach to poverty measurement is proposed which avoids specifying a frontier, the price is that an agent's poverty status
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The Journal of Economic Inequality
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Global Perspectives on Wealth and Distribution
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Papers by Gordon Anderson