November 2019

IZA DP No. 12811: Inequality Comparisons with Ordinal Data

published in: Review of Income and Wealth, 2021, 67 (3), 547- 563

Non-intersection of appropriately-defined Generalized Lorenz (GL) curves is equivalent to a unanimous ranking of distributions of ordinal data by all Cowell and Flachaire (Economica 2017) indices of inequality and by a new index based on GL curve areas. Comparisons of life satisfaction distributions for six countries reveal a substantial number of unanimous inequality rankings.