This volume is a collection of papers presented at the first meeting of the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality (ECINEQ). The Society??'s aims are to ???provide an international forum for all researchers interested in the study of economic inequality and related fields, bringing together the diversity of perspectives.??? The conference was held in Palma de Mallorca, Spain in July 2005. Over eighty parallel sessions were offered, providing novel and interesting work from both mature scholars and as well as new PhD???s.
With so much quality work from which to choose, it was necessary to limit the scope of Research on Economic Inequality, Volume 14. The first five papers all employ Spanish data and cover topics such as child poverty, social preferences toward redistribution, social exclusion, and multidimensional poverty. The next three papers examine inequality in the EU using alternative methodologies. Chapter Nine explores poverty dynamics among the elderly in Italy. Chapter Ten presents and extends the ???state of the art??? in multidimensional inequality measurement. Chapters Eleven and Twelve contribute to the theoretical underpinnings of inequality measurement. Chapters Thirteen through Fifteen contain analytical papers focused on evaluating the effects of public policy on poverty and inequality. The final two chapters use the questionnaire-experimental approach to examine individuals??? distributional preferences.
*Part of the Research on Economic Inequality series.
*Presents papers form the inaugural meeting of the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality (ECINEQ)
*Provides an international forum for all researchers interested in the study of economicinequality and related fields
*Brings together a diversity of perspectives

Research on Economic Inequality Volume 12 is the outgrowth of University of Alabama Poverty and Inequality conference, May 22-25, 2003. The motivation for the conference was to honor John P. Formby upon his retirement. The conference, funded by the University, was designed to bring together three groups of people; first, some of the most recognized scholars in the field, second, current and former colleagues of John Formby's working in this field, and third, Dr. Formby's former PhD and post-doctoral students. Seventeen papers were presented, eleven of which are authored or co-authored by Dr. Formby's former students. Peter Lambert and Yoram Amiel also participated in the conference. Dan slottje, John Creedy, Shlomo Yitzhaki and Quentin Wodon did not attend but contributed papers.

The first two papers in Volume 12 examine the impact of the minimum wage. The Formby-Bishop-Kim paper compares the poverty reducing effects of the minimum wage to two alternative poverty reducing policies. In the Cover-Kim paper, the authors control for local cost of living to gauge the impact of the minimum wage on teenage employment.

The third and fourth papers apply experimental methods to study respondent's attitudes toward inequality and risk. The Beckman et al. paper asks whether the failure to reliably observe inequality aversion (in experiments) extends to risk aversion.

In the fifth paper, Buhong Zheng investigates the properties of "intermediate" measures of inequality. The paper questions, a)whether these measures maintain their intermediateness through inequality neutral transformations, and b) the unit consistency of these measures. In the sixth paper, Bishop-Chow-Zeager extendtheir earlier work on Lorenz curve decompositions. The decomposed Lorenz curve can be easily used to construct interdistributional Lorenz curve measures of economic advantage among subgroups. Using U.S. data they find smaller economic advantages over time by race and region, although not by marital status. In the seventh paper, Yitzhaki and Wodon observe that mobility is the transition between two inequality states and establish the equivalence of the Gini index with the Atkinson-Plotnik measure of horizontal equity. They illustrate their results with data from rural Mexico.

The eighth and ninth papers address tax microsimulation modeling. Creedy-Kalb-Scutella compare alternative approaches to measuring poverty and inequality in a discrete hours model.

"Research on Economic Inequality, Volume 10, Fiscal Policy, Inequality and Welfare" contains ten papers, both theoretical and applied, on tax progressivity and tax and transfer equity. Theory topics covered include consumption tax equity, alternative definitions of tax progressivity, horizontal equity and reranking. The applied work includes studies of Australia's consumption taxes, Israel's national insurance tax system, Mexican transfer system, Canadian tax equity, trends in US tax and transfer progressivity and a study of the impact of the repeal of the US marriage tax penalty.

What is inequality? In recent years there has been an explosion of interest in the subject that has yielded a substantial body of formal tools and results for income-distribution analysis. But does the standard axiomatic structure coincide with public perceptions of inequality? Or is the economist's concept of inequality a thing apart, perpetuated through serial brainwashing in the way the subject is studied and taught? Amiel and Cowell examine the evidence from a large international questionnaire experiment using student respondents. Along with basic "cake-sharing" issues, related questions involving social-welfare rankings, the relationship between inequality and overall income growth and the meaning of poverty comparisons are considered.