ArticleNature human behaviour2022
Measuring inequality beyond the Gini coefficient may clarify conflicting findings.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Pooled it
- Cardiovascular Health Equity: Time for a New Era of Science, Sociology, and Interventions.European heart journal · 2026Article
- Beyond the Gini index: a poverty-normalized spatial Bayesian model for assessing territorial inequality.International journal for equity in health · 2026Article
- Promoting sustainable human mobility for income segregation mitigation.Patterns (New York, N.Y.) · 2026Article
- How common depictions of wealth distributions can bias people to underestimate inequality.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Cardiovascular Health Equity: Time for a New Era of Science, Sociology, and Interventions.Global heart · 2026Article
- Multidimensional Loss Chasing among Online Gamblers: Assessing Optimized Thresholds for the Prediction of Gambling Harm.Journal of gambling studies · 2025Article
- Perceived economic inequality is linked to poorer sleep quality.BMC psychology · 2025Article
- Neighborhood deprivation and iodine levels influence air pollution effects on maternal thyroid function in early pregnancy.Environmental research · 2025Article
- Article
- Social, cultural and political conditions for advancing health equity: examples from eight country case studies (2011-2021).BMJ global health · 2024Article
- A behavioral dataset of predictive decisions given trends in information across adulthood.Data in brief · 2024Article
- Selective insensitivity to income held by the richest.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- Standard Deviation vs. Gini Coefficient: Effects of Different Indicators of Classroom Status Hierarchy on Bullying Behavior.Journal of youth and adolescence · 2024Article
- Article
- Perceptions of Income Inequality and Women's Intrasexual Competition.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2023Article
- Subjective socioeconomic status and income inequality are associated with self-reported morality across 67 countries.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Reassessing the econometric measurement of inequality and poverty: toward a cost-of-living approach.Humanities & social sciences communications · 2023Article
- Determinants of individual income in EU countries: implications for social policy targeting.Frontiers in sociology · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Prior research has found mixed results on how economic inequality is related to various outcomes. These contradicting findings may in part stem from a predominant focus on the Gini coefficient, which only narrowly captures inequality. Here, we conceptualize the measurement of inequality as a data reduction task of income distributions. Using a uniquely fine-grained dataset of N = 3,056 US county-level income distributions, we estimate the fit of 17 previously proposed models and find that multi-parameter models consistently outperform single-parameter models (i.e., models that represent single-parameter measures like the Gini coefficient). Subsequent simulations reveal that the best-fitting model-the two-parameter Ortega model-distinguishes between inequality concentrated at lower- versus top-income percentiles. When applied to 100 policy outcomes from a range of fields (including health, crime and social mobility), the two Ortega parameters frequently provide directionally and magnitudinally different correlations than the Gini coefficient. Our findings highlight the importance of multi-parameter models and data-driven methods to study inequality.
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