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The Theil Indices in Parametric Families of Income Distributions—A Short Review

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Review of Income and Wealth

Published online on

Abstract

The Theil indices (Theil, ) are widely used measures for studying the degree of concentration and inequality in size income distributions. Their property of decomposability makes these indices especially useful in applied economic analysis. This paper is a synthetic review of the Theil indices for the most important and popular parametric income distributions. Extensions to higher dimensions are sketched.