Does Income Mobility Equalize Longer-term Incomes? New Measures of an Old Concept

This paper develops a new class of measures of mobility as an equalizer of longer-term incomes – a concept different from other notions such as mobility as time-independence, positional movement, share movement, income flux, and directional income movement. A number of properties are specified leading to a class of indices, one easily-implementable member of which is applied to data for the United States and France. Using this index, income mobility is found to have equalized longer-term earnings among U.S. men in the 1970s but not in the 1980s or 1990s. In France, though, income mobility was equalizing throughout, and it has attained its maximum in the most recent period

Measuring inequality: tools and an illustration

BACKGROUND: This paper examines an aspect of the problem of measuring inequality in health services. The measures that are commonly applied can be misleading because such measures obscure the difficulty in obtaining a complete ranking of distributions. The nature of the social welfare function underlying these measures is important. The overall object is to demonstrate that varying implications for the welfare of society result from inequality measures. METHOD: Various tools for measuring a distribution are applied to some illustrative data on four distributions about mental health services. Although these data refer to this one aspect of health, the exercise is of broader relevance than mental health. The summary measures of dispersion conventionally used in empirical work are applied to the data here, such as the standard deviation, the coefficient of variation, the relative mean deviation and the Gini coefficient. Other, less commonly used measures also are applied, such as Theil's Index of Entropy, Atkinson's Measure (using two differing assumptions about the inequality aversion parameter). Lorenz curves are also drawn for these distributions. RESULTS: Distributions are shown to have differing rankings (in terms of which is more equal than another), depending on which measure is applied. CONCLUSION: The scope and content of the literature from the past decade about health inequalities and inequities suggest that the economic literature from the past 100 years about inequality and inequity may have been overlooked, generally speaking, in the health inequalities and inequity literature. An understanding of economic theory and economic method, partly introduced in this article, is helpful in analysing health inequality and inequity

Correlation and Inequality in Weighted Majority Voting Games

In a weighted majority voting game, the weights of the players are determined based on some socio-economic parameter. A number of measures have been proposed to measure the voting powers of the different players. A basic question in this area is to what extent does the variation in the voting powers reflect the variation in the weights? The voting powers depend on the winning threshold. So, a second question is what is the appropriate value of the winning threshold? In this work, we propose two simple ideas to address these and related questions in a quantifiable manner. The first idea is to use Pearson's Correlation Coefficient between the weight vector and the power profile to measure the similarity between weight and power. The second idea is to use standard inequality measures to quantify the inequality in the weight vector as well as in the power profile. These two ideas answer the first question. Both the weight-power similarity and inequality scores of voting power profiles depend on the value of the winning threshold. For situations of practical interest, it turns out that it is possible to choose a value of the winning threshold which maximises the similarity score and also minimises the difference in the inequality scores of the weight vector and the power profile. This provides an answer to the second question. Using the above formalisation, we are able to quantitatively argue that it is sufficient to consider only the vector of swings for the players as the power measure. We apply our methodology to the voting games arising in the decision making processes of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Union (EU). In the case of IMF, we provide quantitative evidence that the actual winning threshold that is currently used is sub-optimal and instead propose a winning threshold which has a firm analytical backing. On the other hand, in the case of EU, we provide quantitative evidence that the presently used threshold is very close to the optimal

Incorporating concepts of inequality and inequity into health benefits analysis

BACKGROUND: Although environmental policy decisions are often based in part on both risk assessment information and environmental justice concerns, formalized approaches for addressing inequality or inequity when estimating the health benefits of pollution control have been lacking. Inequality indicators that fulfill basic axioms and agree with relevant definitions and concepts in health benefits analysis and environmental justice analysis can allow for quantitative examination of efficiency-equality tradeoffs in pollution control policies. METHODS: To develop appropriate inequality indicators for health benefits analysis, we provide relevant definitions from the fields of risk assessment and environmental justice and consider the implications. We evaluate axioms proposed in past studies of inequality indicators and develop additional axioms relevant to this context. We survey the literature on previous applications of inequality indicators and evaluate five candidate indicators in reference to our proposed axioms. We present an illustrative pollution control example to determine whether our selected indicators provide interpretable information. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: We conclude that an inequality indicator for health benefits analysis should not decrease when risk is transferred from a low-risk to high-risk person, and that it should decrease when risk is transferred from a high-risk to low-risk person (Pigou-Dalton transfer principle), and that it should be able to have total inequality divided into its constituent parts (subgroup decomposability). We additionally propose that an ideal indicator should avoid value judgments about the relative importance of transfers at different percentiles of the risk distribution, incorporate health risk with evidence about differential susceptibility, include baseline distributions of risk, use appropriate geographic resolution and scope, and consider multiple competing policy alternatives. Given these criteria, we select the Atkinson index as the single indicator most appropriate for health benefits analysis, with other indicators useful for sensitivity analysis. Our illustrative pollution control example demonstrates how these indices can help a policy maker determine control strategies that are dominated from an efficiency and equality standpoint, those that are dominated for some but not all societal viewpoints on inequality averseness, and those that are on the optimal efficiency-equality frontier, allowing for more informed pollution control policies

Quantitative measurements of inequality in geographic accessibility to pediatric care in Oita Prefecture, Japan: Standardization with complete spatial randomness

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>A quantitative measurement of inequality in geographic accessibility to pediatric care as well as that of mean distance or travel time is very important for priority setting to ensure fair access to pediatric facilities. However, conventional techniques for measuring inequality is inappropriate in geographic settings. Since inequality measures of access distance or travel time is strongly influenced by the background geographic distribution patterns, they cannot be directly used for regional comparisons of geographic accessibility. The objective of this study is to resolve this issue by using a standardization approach.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Travel times to the nearest pediatric care were calculated for all children in Oita Prefecture, Japan. Relative mean differences were considered as the inequality measure for secondary medical service areas, and were standardized with an expected value estimated from a Monte Carlo simulation based on complete spatial randomness.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The observed mean travel times in the area considered averaged 4.50 minutes, ranging from 1.83 to 7.02 minutes. The mean of the observed inequality measure was 1.1, ranging from 0.9 to 1.3. The expected values of the inequality measure varied according to the background geographic distribution pattern of children, which ranged from 0.3 to 0.7. After standardizing the observed inequality measure with the expected one, we found that the ranks of the inequality measure were reversed for the observed areas.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Using the indicator proposed in this paper, it is possible to compare the inequality in geographic accessibility among regions. Such a comparison may facilitate priority setting in health policy and planning.</p

Effective transcription factor binding site prediction using a combination of optimization, a genetic algorithm and discriminant analysis to capture distant interactions

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Reliable transcription factor binding site (TFBS) prediction methods are essential for computer annotation of large amount of genome sequence data. However, current methods to predict TFBSs are hampered by the high false-positive rates that occur when only sequence conservation at the core binding-sites is considered.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>To improve this situation, we have quantified the performance of several Position Weight Matrix (PWM) algorithms, using exhaustive approaches to find their optimal length and position. We applied these approaches to bio-medically important TFBSs involved in the regulation of cell growth and proliferation as well as in inflammatory, immune, and antiviral responses (NF-κB, ISGF3, IRF1, STAT1), obesity and lipid metabolism (PPAR, SREBP, HNF4), regulation of the steroidogenic (SF-1) and cell cycle (E2F) genes expression. We have also gained extra specificity using a method, entitled SiteGA, which takes into account structural interactions within TFBS core and flanking regions, using a genetic algorithm (GA) with a discriminant function of locally positioned dinucleotide (LPD) frequencies.</p> <p>To ensure a higher confidence in our approach, we applied resampling-jackknife and bootstrap tests for the comparison, it appears that, optimized PWM and SiteGA have shown similar recognition performances. Then we applied SiteGA and optimized PWMs (both separately and together) to sequences in the Eukaryotic Promoter Database (EPD). The resulting SiteGA recognition models can now be used to search sequences for BSs using the web tool, SiteGA.</p> <p>Analysis of dependencies between close and distant LPDs revealed by SiteGA models has shown that the most significant correlations are between close LPDs, and are generally located in the core (footprint) region. A greater number of less significant correlations are mainly between distant LPDs, which spanned both core and flanking regions. When SiteGA and optimized PWM models were applied together, this substantially reduced false positives at least at higher stringencies.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Based on this analysis, SiteGA adds substantial specificity even to optimized PWMs and may be considered for large-scale genome analysis. It adds to the range of techniques available for TFBS prediction, and EPD analysis has led to a list of genes which appear to be regulated by the above TFs.</p