Working Paper

Beyond Inequality: A Novel Measure of Skewness and its Properties

Walter Kraemer, Holger Dette
CESifo, Munich, 2016

CESifo Working Paper No. 5972

We show that a recent appendix to the Gini-coefficient to make the latter more sensitive to asymmetric income distributions can be viewed as an abstract measure of skewness. We develop some of its properties and apply it to the US-income distribution in 1974 and 2010.

CESifo Category
Monetary Policy and International Finance
Empirical and Theoretical Methods
Keywords: inequality, Gini-index, skewness
JEL Classification: C460, D310, D630