arXiv subjects

Vanesa Jorda

Publications and source records attributed to Vanesa Jorda.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

Evolution of global inequality in well-being: A copula-based approach

We employ a flexible parametric model to estimate global income, health, and education distributions from 1980 to 2015. Using these marginal distributions within a copula-based framework, we construct a global joint distribution of well-being. This approach allows us to specifically analyze the impact of dependency structures on global well-being inequality. While inequality decreased in each individual dimension, our findings suggest that multidimensional inequality does not necessarily follow this trend. Its evolution is influenced by the interdependence among dimensions and the chosen inequality aversion parameter.

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arXiv2018

Estimation of income inequality from grouped data

Grouped data in form of income shares have been conventionally used to estimate income inequality due to the lack of availability of individual records. Most prior research on economic inequality relies on lower bounds of inequality measures in order to avoid the need to impose a parametric functional form to describe the income distribution. These estimates neglect income differences within shares, introducing, therefore, a potential source of measurement error. The aim of this paper is to explore a nuanced alternative to estimate income inequality, which leads to a reliable representation of the income distribution within shares. We examine the performance of the generalized beta distribution of the second kind and related models to estimate different inequality measures and compare the accuracy of these estimates with the nonparametric lower bound in more than 5000 datasets covering 182 countries over the period 1867-2015. We deploy two different econometric strategies to estimate the parametric distributions, non-linear least squares and generalised method of moments, both implemented in R and conveniently available in the package GB2group. Despite its popularity, the nonparametric approach is outperformed even the simplest two-parameter models. Our results confirm the excellent performance of the GB2 distribution to represent income data for a heterogeneous sample of countries, which provides highly reliable estimates of several inequality measures. This strong result and the access to an easy tool to implement the estimation of this family of distributions, we believe, will incentivize its use, thus contributing to the development of reliable estimates of inequality trends.

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arXiv2016

Measuring educational attainment as a continuous variable: a new database (1970-2010)

In this paper, we introduce a new comprehensive data set on educational attainment and inequality measures of education for 142 countries over the period 1970 to 2010. Most of the previous attempts to measure educational attainment have treated education as a categorical variable, whose mean is computed as a weighted average of the official duration of each cycle and attainment rates, thus omitting differences in educational achievement within levels of education. This aggregation into different groups may result in a loss of information introducing, therefore, a potential source of measurement error. We explore here a more nuanced alternative to estimate educational attainment, which considers the continuous nature of the educational variable. This `continuous approach' allows us to impose more plausible assumptions about the distribution of years of schooling within each level of education, and to take into account the right censoring of the data in the estimation, thus leading to more accurate estimates of educational attainment and education inequality. These improved series may help to better understand the role of education on different socio-economic aspects, such as quality of life and human capital formation.

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