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Volume 16 of Research on Economic Inequality contains a selection of papers from the Second Biannual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, Berlin, July 2007. The volume opens with an essay on equal liberties by Serge-Christophe Kolm and is followed by papers on the equality of opportunity, inequality measurement issues, and an applications section.

Purpose: Most of the characterizations of inequality or poverty indices assume some invariance condition, be that scale, translation, or intermediate, which imposes value judgments on the measurement. In the unidimensional approach, Zheng (2007a, 2007b) suggests replacing all these properties with the unit-consistency axiom, which requires that the inequality or poverty rankings, rather than their cardinal values, are not altered when income is measured in different monetary units. The aim of this paper is to introduce a multidimensional generalization of this axiom and characterize classes of multidimensional inequality and poverty measures that are unit consistent.

Design/methodology/approach: Zheng (2007a, 2007b) characterizes families of inequality and poverty measures that fulfil the unit-consistency axiom. Tsui (1999, 2002), in turn, derives families of the multidimensional relative inequality and poverty measures. Both of these contributions are the background taken to achieve our characterization results.

Findings: This paper merges these two generalizations to identify the canonical forms of all the multidimensional subgroup- and unit-consistent inequality and poverty measures. The inequality families we derive are generalizations of both the Zheng and Tsui inequality families. The poverty indices presented are generalizations of Tsui's relative poverty families as well as the families identified by Zheng.

Originality/value: The inequality and poverty families characterized in this paper are unit and subgroup consistent, both of them being appropriate requirements in empirical applications in which inequality or poverty in a population split into groups is measured. Then, in empirical applications, it makes sense to choose measures from the families we derive.

This note formally investigates the applicability of stochastic dominance (Lorenz dominance) to ordinal data such as self-reported health status. We confirm that for ordinal data distributions, stochastic dominance has limited applicability in ranking social welfare, while it has no applicability in ranking inequality.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the advantages and disadvantages of several intermediate inequality measures, paying special attention to the unit-consistency axiom proposed by Zheng (2007). First, we demonstrate why one of the most referenced intermediate indices, proposed by Bossert and Pfingsten (1990), is not unit-consistent. Second, we explain why the invariance criterion proposed by Del Río and Ruiz-Castillo (2000), recently generalized by Del Río and Alonso-Villar (2008), leads instead to inequality measures that are unaffected by the currency unit. Third, we show that the intermediate measures proposed by Kolm (1976) may also violate unit-consistency. Finally, we reflect on the concept of intermediateness behind the above notions together with that proposed by Krtscha (1994). Special attention is paid to the geometric interpretations of our results.

Dardanoni's (1993) results on mobility and social welfare in a simple Markov model of “pure” mobility are extended to rank distributions characterized by unequal growth. Partial orders of welfare states are derived and shown to be equivalent to rankings of generalized permanent income Lorenz curves. The results represent a natural extension to mobility of Shorrocks' (1983) well-known generalization of the Lorenz dominance theorem of Kolm (1969) andAtkinson (1970).

This paper applies a recently developed method of ranking socioeconomic inequality in health to ranking U.S. happiness from 1994 to 2012 using the GSS data. We also compare happiness between subgroups as decomposed by gender, race, and age. We establish and test a monotone condition of happiness – a richer person is likely to be happier. Under the monotone condition, standard tools of welfare and inequality ranking can be applied straightforwardly.