Comparing Income Distributions brings together John Creedy’s recent original research and analyses of income distribution. The book is concerned with both static, or cross-sectional, comparisons, and dynamic aspects of income mobility. The author presents new methods of depicting and measuring income mobility and poverty persistence. Income mobility is explored in terms of individuals’ relative income changes and their positional changes within the distribution.

The first half of the book covers a range of technical aspects of inequality measurement, including less well-known properties of inequality indices, and the decomposition of inequality changes into component contributions. The second half explores various aspects of the graphical display and measurement of income mobility. While the focus of the book is on methods, illustrative examples are provided using New Zealand data.

Graduate students, public sector economists, and researchers interested in income distribution will welcome this important work.