Roberta Rosa Valtorta

Postdoctoral Researcher



Department of Psychology

University of Milano-Bicocca



A twofold subjective measure of income inequality


Journal article


Attila Gáspár, Carmen Cervone, Federica Durante, Anne Maass, Caterina Suitner, Roberta Rosa Valtorta, Michela Vezzoli
Social Indicators Research, vol. 168, 2023, pp. 25-43


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APA   Click to copy
Gáspár, A., Cervone, C., Durante, F., Maass, A., Suitner, C., Valtorta, R. R., & Vezzoli, M. (2023). A twofold subjective measure of income inequality. Social Indicators Research, 168, 25–43. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-023-03121-w


Chicago/Turabian   Click to copy
Gáspár, Attila, Carmen Cervone, Federica Durante, Anne Maass, Caterina Suitner, Roberta Rosa Valtorta, and Michela Vezzoli. “A Twofold Subjective Measure of Income Inequality.” Social Indicators Research 168 (2023): 25–43.


MLA   Click to copy
Gáspár, Attila, et al. “A Twofold Subjective Measure of Income Inequality.” Social Indicators Research, vol. 168, 2023, pp. 25–43, doi:10.1007/s11205-023-03121-w.


BibTeX   Click to copy

@article{attila2023a,
  title = {A twofold subjective measure of income inequality},
  year = {2023},
  journal = {Social Indicators Research},
  pages = {25-43},
  volume = {168},
  doi = {10.1007/s11205-023-03121-w},
  author = {Gáspár, Attila and Cervone, Carmen and Durante, Federica and Maass, Anne and Suitner, Caterina and Valtorta, Roberta Rosa and Vezzoli, Michela}
}

Abstract

Social scientists have been aiming to calculate a "subjective income Gini coefficient" of survey respondents that would describe their beliefs about income inequality in their country. Niehues (2014) derives this estimate from respondents' beliefs about the relative sizes of different social classes (answers to "shape of society" questions), while Kuhn (2015) estimates it using beliefs about the pay structure. We combine their efforts to calculate what we call a twofold subjective Gini coefficient, which incorporates both pieces of information independently from one another. We present the country-level distribution of perceived and desired twofold subjective Gini coefficients using the ISSP Social Inequality V survey (ISSP, 2019). Accounting for both subjective class structure and pay structure yields much lower perceived and desired levels of inequality. At the country level, the averages of the twofold subjective Gini coefficients are closer to actual income Gini coefficients than the previous measures. At the individual level, the twofold subjective Gini coefficients are better predictors of the individual's verbal assessment of inequality and their preferences toward redistribution.


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