This paper provides unheard direct evidence that comparisons exert a significant effect onsubjective well-being. It also evaluates the relative importance of different types ofbenchmarks...

This paper studies the impact of an increase in the enforcement of labor regulations onunemployment and inequality, using city level data from Brazil. We find that stricterenforcement (affecting the payment of mandated benefits to formal workers) leads to: higherunemployment, less income...

We consider a two-person Cournot game of voluntary contributions to a public good with identicalindividual preferences, and examine equilibrium aggregate welfare under a separable, symmetric andconcave social welfare function. Assuming the public good is pure, Itaya, de Meza and Myles...

A set of agents with possibly different waiting costs have to receive the same service one after theother. Efficiency requires to maximize total welfare. Equity requires to at least treat equal agentsequally. One must form a queue, set up monetary transfers to compensate agents having to...

For two independent principles of intergenerational equity, the implied discount rate equals the growthrate of real per-capita income, say 2%, thus falling right into the range suggested by the U.S. Office ofManagement and Budget. To prove this, we develop a simple tool to evaluate small policy...

We analyze a model of resource allocation in which agents' abilities (to transform the resourceinto an interpersonally comparable outcome) and initial endowments may differ. We imposeethical and operational axioms in this model and characterize some allocation rules as a resultof combining these...

This paper provides an analytical framework for exploring the relationshipbetween equity and efficiency for two riparians sharing a transboundary river.Decreasing marginal productivities of water make a noncooperative approach inefficientwhen water is scarce. If the upstream riparian uses its...

We establish the precise connections between progressive taxation andinequality reduction, in a setting where the level of tax revenue to be raised isendogenously fixed and tax schemes are balanced. We show that, in contrastwith the traditional literature on taxation, the equivalence between...

We analyze the rationalizability of variable-population social-choice functions in a welfaristframework. It is shown that xed-population rationalizability and a weakening ofcongruence together are necessary and suffcient for rational choice, given a plausible dominanceproperty that prevents the...

Discounting the utilities of future people or giving smaller weights to groups other thanone's own is often criticized on the grounds that the resulting objective function diers fromthe ethically appropriate one...