This paper examines the allocative implications of progressive income taxation when individuals care about their … relative income. It shows that tax progressivity might improve efficiency, and the more so in egalitarian economies …. Introducing a progressive income tax can yield a Pareto improvement if pre-tax income is evenly distributed. Implementing …

In normative public economics it is crucial to know how fast the marginal utility of income declines as income …, using a number of assumptions, we are able to estimate the elasticity of marginal utility with respect to income. We obtain …

We investigate the evolution of global welfare in two dimensions: income per capita and life expectancy. First, we … estimate the marginal distributions of income and life expectancy separately. More importantly, in contrast to previous … univariate approaches, we consider income and life expectancy jointly and estimate their bivariate global distribution for 137 …