Fall Seminar Series - October 16, 2003
University of Minnesota
School of Statistics
College of Liberal Arts

Lorenz, Gini, Bonferroni and Quantile Regression

Kjell Doksum
Department of Statistics
University of California, Berkeley

Thursday, October 16, 2003
4:00 PM, 115 Ford Hall
Minneapolis, East Bank Campus
Social at 3:30 PM, 300 Ford Hall

Abstract

  Lorenz and Bonferroni introduced measures of the concentration of income that indicate how much the incomes below the uth quantile fall short of the egalitarian situation where everyone has the same income.As u changes,these measures become curves on [0,1].Gini introduced an index that is the average over u of the difference between the Lorenz curve and its egalitarian version.Bonferroni similarly introduced an index based on the Bonferroni curve.In this paper we consider the situation where the income distribution depends on covariates.In this case the Lorenz and Bonferroni curves as well as the Gini and Bonferroni indices are functions of the covariates.We consider the estimation of these functions for parametric,semiparametric and nonparametric models.In particular,we consider a semiparametric model involving regression coefficients and an unknown baseline income distribution.In this model we find partial likelihood estimates of the regression coefficients and the baseline distribution that can be used to construct estimates of the Gini and Bonferroni indices. We also consider nonparametric models where nonparametric quantile regression estimators can be used to estimate Lorenz,Gini,and Bonferroni regression.This is joint work with Rolf Aaberge and Steinar Bjerve.