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Unbiased estimation of income inequality

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Abstract

In a previous paper Gastwirth shows that a broad family of measures of inequality can be accurately estimated when the tax data are known in groups (more precisely, when we know the number of returns in each of several class intervals and their corresponding average income). In the present paper we show that some measures of the preceding family can be unbiasedly estimated when the tax data are individually known for a sample from the population. Specifically, we construct unbiased estimators of a particular measure of inequality in the samplings with and without replacement, and in the stratified samplings with and without replacement.

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Pérez, R., Caso, C. & Gil, M.A. Unbiased estimation of income inequality. Statistische Hefte 27, 227–237 (1986). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02932569

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