María Noel Pi Alperin

Measuring and accounting for the deprivation gap of Portuguese immigrants in Luxembourg

This paper examines the relative well-being of Portuguese immigrants in Luxembourg by looking at non-monetary, or ?direct indicators? of material deprivation. The paper not only documents deprivation differentials between immigrants and natives, but also models the association between material deprivation indicators, income and population characteristics in order to shed light on the sources of differentials. In particular, we measure how much income differentials explain differences in material deprivation. We find that answer to this question depend a lot on what deprivation indicators are taken into consideration (and a little on how aggregate material deprivation indicators are constructed). Income differences explain material deprivation differences entirely when the latter is measured according the European Commission?s headline indicator on material deprivation. Inclusion of housing condition indicators mitigates this relationship and we then find compelling evidence that material deprivation is not entirely accounted for by income differentials.

Inequalities in multidimensional poverty: evidence from Argentina

This article presents a new synthetic methodology that gauges simultaneously the inequalities in multidimensional poverty within and between groups of population and the dimensions that tend to increase inequality in poverty.

Health inequality indices and exogenous risk factors: an illustration on Luxembourgish workers

This paper proposes an aggregable family of multidimensional concentration indices which is characterized in order to be consistent with a property of exogenous risk factors, i.e. health risks for which agents are not responsible for. It is shown that those indices are of interest when individuals face different risk factors, whereas traditional indices fail to deal with heterogeneous agents. In this respect, necessary and suficient conditions are stated in order to rank two health distributions thanks to the generalized concentration curves. An illustration is performed using a sample of individuals living in Luxembourg aged 50 and older.

A Two-Parameter Family of Socio-Economic Health Inequality Indices: Accounting for Risk and Inequality Aversions

This paper proposes a two-parameter family of socio-economic health inequality indices. First, these indices allow a Boolean risk factor to be associated to other health dimensions. Second, multidimensional health distributions can be compared thanks to a stochastic dominance rule, which includes the attitude of the social planner with respect to the risk factor (risk neutrality, risk aversion and extreme risk aversion). Third, each order of stochastic dominance is also associated to the intensity of possible health transfers occurring between individuals, that is, the degree of inequality aversion of the social planner. This approach is a multidimensional extension of Yitzhakis Gini indices accounting simultaneously for risk and redistribution.

Disentangling the impacts of circumstances and efforts on health inequality: the case of Luxembourg

This paper attempts to determine the contribution of circumstances, efforts (and lifestyle) and demographic variables (age and gender) to inequality in health in Luxembourg. Health is measured subjectively by self-assessed health and is considered first as a binary variable, then as an ordinal variable. The educational level of each parent, the financial situation of the family during childhood and the area of birth are considered as circumstances while effort and lifestyle variables are proxied by information on the educational level of the individual, whether he/she smoked and whether he/she had a physical activity on a regular basis. The respective impacts of the three categories of explanatory variables (circumstances, effort and demographic variables) on health inequality are derived via a Shapley decomposition of the pseudo R-square of logit regressions. Differences in circumstances and effort and lifestyle explain each around a quarter of the pseudo R-square.

Aggregable Health Inequality Indices

An aggregable family of multidimensional concentration indices is characterized, in order to be consistent with a property of exogenous risk factors, i.e. health risks for which agents are not responsible for. The family of concentration indices (or achievement indices by duality) lies in the class of polynomial functions. Necessary and suffcient conditions are stated in order to rank two health distributions thanks to the generalized concentration curves. It is shown that the properties of mirror and symmetry are compatible with a sub-family of concentration indices being polynomial functions. A dominance criterion exists for this sub-family of indices, provided that the decision maker is an inequality lover.