We investigate the problem of how to make welfare comparisons of income distributions hen a population allocation problem (how a population should be optimally divided over families for given resources) adds to the usual income allocation problem. Pro-family and anti-family stances are...

In this paper, we analyze the impact of a tax policy change on social welfare by using jointly a collective model of household labor supply and a microsimulation program of the French taxbenefit system. The collective approach allows studying the intrahousehold distribution so that for the first...

There is a large empirical literature on policy measures targeted at children but surprisingly very little theoretical foundation to ground the debate on the optimality of the different instruments. In the present paper, we examine the merit of targeting children through two general policies,...

We examine the relative merits of targeting children within the household through price subsidies and cash transfers. To do so, we model the behavior of a household composed of one adult and one child. We then show that 'favorable' distortions from price subsidies may allow redistributing toward...

There is a large empirical literature on policy measures targeted at children but surprisingly very little theoretical foundation to ground the debate on the optimality of the different instruments. In the present paper, we examine the merit of targeting children through two general policies,...

The Foster, Greer, Thorbecke (1984) class nests several of the most widely used mea- sures in theoretical and empirical work on economic poverty. Use of this general class of measures, however, presupposes a dimension of well-being that, like income, is cardinally measurable. Responding to...

In this study it is demonstrated that standard income inequality measures, such as the Lorenz curve and the Gini index, can successfully be applied to the distribution of Olympic success. Olympic success is distributed very unevenly, with the rich countries capturing a disproportionately higher...

This paper discusses the rationale as well as the challenges involved when constructing gender-related indicators of well-being. It argues that such indicators are critically important but that their construction involves a number of conceptual and measurement problems. Among the conceptual...

Income-based as well as most existing multidimensional poverty indices (MPI) assume equal distribution within the household and thus are likely to lead to yield a biased assessment of individual poverty, and poverty by age or gender. In this paper we first show that the direction of the bias...

Most existing empirical papers concerned about multidimensional poverty use the house- hold as the unit of analysis, meaning that multidimensional poverty status of the household is equated with the multidimensional poverty status of all individuals in the household. This assumption,...