Variance estimation for measures of income inequality and polarization - An empirical study

Measures of income inequality and polarization are fundamental to the discussions of many economic and thus their variances are not expressible by simple formulae and one must rely on approximate variance estimation techniques. In this paper, several methods of variance estimation for six particular income inequality and polarization measures are summarized and their performance is investigated empirically through a simulation study based on the Canadian Survey of Consumer Finance. Our findings indicate that for the measures studied here, the bootstrap and the estimating equations approach perform considerably better than the other methods.