Search results for "Gini index"
showing 6 items of 6 documents
Understanding trends and drivers of urban poverty in American cities
2022
Urban poverty arises from the uneven distribution of poor populations across neighborhoods of a city. We study the trend and drivers of urban poverty across American cities over the last 40 years. To do so, we resort to a family of urban poverty indices that account for features of incidence, distribution, and segregation of poverty across census tracts. Compared to the universally-adopted concentrated poverty index, these measures have a solid normative background. We use tract-level data to assess the extent to which demographics, housing, education, employment, and income distribution affect levels and changes in urban poverty. A decomposition study allows to single out the effect of cha…
Extropy: Complementary Dual of Entropy
2015
This article provides a completion to theories of information based on entropy, resolving a longstanding question in its axiomatization as proposed by Shannon and pursued by Jaynes. We show that Shannon's entropy function has a complementary dual function which we call "extropy." The entropy and the extropy of a binary distribution are identical. However, the measure bifurcates into a pair of distinct measures for any quantity that is not merely an event indicator. As with entropy, the maximum extropy distribution is also the uniform distribution, and both measures are invariant with respect to permutations of their mass functions. However, they behave quite differently in their assessments…
Urban poverty: Measurement theory and evidence from American cities
2021
AbstractWe characterize axiomatically a new index of urban poverty that i) captures aspects of the incidence and distribution of poverty across neighborhoods of a city, ii) is related to the Gini index and iii) is consistent with empirical evidence that living in a high poverty neighborhood is detrimental for many dimensions of residents’ well-being. Widely adopted measures of urban poverty, such as the concentrated poverty index, may violate some of the desirable properties we outline. Furthermore, we show that changes of urban poverty within the same city are additively decomposable into the contribution of demographic, convergence, re-ranking and spatial effects. We collect new evidence …
Measuring tourism seasonality across European countries
2018
Abstract This paper will propose a general approach for the analysis and measurement of seasonality in tourism, based on an analysis of the pattern of seasonal swing, as a preliminary step for the assessment of seasonal amplitude. The seasonality of tourism demand across European countries will be analyzed and clusters of countries identified, which are based on a similarity of their seasonal pattern. After discussing the limitations of the most frequently used indices employed in the tourism literature, a new index for measuring seasonality in tourism will be suggested in order to measure seasonal amplitude. The latter takes into account the ordinal and cyclical structures of seasonal vari…
Measuring sustainable economic development through a multidimensional Gini index
2016
This paper analyses the evolution of sustainable economic development inequality in Italy as regards the efforts made by each administrative Region, as a response to the main EU policies issued by the environmental and energy sector. For this purpose a multidimensional generalization of the Gini index has been performed, taking into account two different dimensions (energy and environment), in a time frame of six years (2008-2013). The multidimensional Gini results confirm the positive effect recorded by certain EU policies in determining a reduction in the inequality levels among the Italian Regions. A counterfactual analysis further underlined the relevant role played by the energetic dim…
Developing and Comparing Indices to Evaluate Community Knowledge Building in an Educational Research Course
2022
This paper implements a novel approach to analyzing the degree of Collective Cognitive Responsibility (CCR) in a Knowledge Building community, based on socioeconomic and scientometric measures. After engaging in Knowledge Forum (KF) discussions for one semester, 36 students identified impactful ideas in their portfolios, which were then used to develop their impact scores. These scores were then transformed and plotted along the Lorenz Curve and the Gini coefficient to visualize the degree of equidistribution of recognition in the community and, by extension, the degree of collective responsibility shared by members of the community. Additionally, students were classified into member roles …