Stability of household income in European countries in the 1990's
N. T. Longford and
M. G. Pittau
(University of Rome "La Sapienza", Rome, Italy)
Abstract
This paper explores the patterns of change in the annual household income
in the countries of the European Community during the years 1994-1999.
The income is modelled by mixtures of multivariate log-normal distributions,
and the mixture components are interpreted as representing one subpopulation
with steady increments and others with various levels of volatility.
The method is extended to models for a combination of log-normal
and categorical variables.
An index of income stability is defined for the countries.
Throughout, we emphasize graphical summaries of the results.
Computational Statistics and Data Analysis 51, 1363-1384, 2006.