We examine the degree of trust and trustworthiness in an experimental trust game with 662 participants from six different age groups, ranging from 8-year-olds to retired persons. Although both trust and trustworthiness have been identified as fundamental pillars for efficient economic...

An important element for the public support of policies is their perceived justice. At the same time most policy choices have uncertain outcomes. We report the results of a first experiment investigating just allocations of resources when some recipients are exposed to uncertainty. Although,...

We present results from a field experiment testing the gift-exchange hypothesis inside a tree-planting firm paying its workforce incentive contracts. Firm managers told a crew of tree planters they would receive a pay raise for one day as a result of a surplus not attributable to past planting...

What is a good incentive-compatible policy when one wants to respect individual choices of labor and human capital but eliminate inequalities due to unequal access to human capital and different returns to human capital, and when earnings and human capital expenditures are the only verifiable...

In this paper, we apply a multidimensional decomposition of the Gini index to the active and retired populations in France. The multi-decomposition of an inequality measure allows us to put into perspective the role of social spending and taxation in reducing inequalities simultaneously among...

We use experimental data to obtain a detailed description of individuals' pro-sociality. Participants are faced with a large number of decisions involving variations in the tradeoffs between own and others' payoffs, as well as in other potentially important factors like individuals' positions...

An inequality measure is consistent if it ranks distributions the same irrespective of whether health quantities are represented in terms of attainment or shortfalls. This consistency property severely restricts the set of admissible inequality measures. We show that, within a more general...

We characterize a class of envy measures. There are three key axioms. Decomposability requires that overall envy is the sum of the envy within and between subgroups. The other two axiomsdeal with the two-individual setting and specify how the envy measure should react to simple changes in the...

The well-known swap distance (Kemeny (1959); Kendall (1938); Hamming (1950)) is analyzed. On weak preferences, this function was characterized by Kemeny (1959) with five conditions; metric, betweenness, neutrality, reducibility, and normalization. We show that the same result can be achieved...

The aim of this article is to analyse in depth the interactions of growth and poverty in Syria, which undertook reforms to reduce the government's involvement in the economy. During the 1996–2004 period, growth was pro-poor in ‘weak absolute’ terms but not in either relative or ‘strong...