This paper shows that electoral incentives affect the occurrence of trade disputes. Focusing on WTO disputes filed by the United States during the 1995-2012 period, we show that U.S. presidents are more likely to initiate a dispute in the year preceding their re-election date. Moreover, disputes...

We derive conditions of individual preferences and technology that give rise to a negative correlation between income inequality and environmental protection. We present a class of models (which captures a static model as well as an overlapping-generations model) in which individuals differ in...

We design an experiment to study the effects of social identity on preferences over redistribution. The experiment highlights the trade-off between social identity concerns and maximization of monetary payoffs. Subjects belonging to two distinct natural groups are randomly assigned gross incomes...

One often heard counter to the concern on rising income and wealth inequality is that it is wrong to focus on inequality of outcomes in a “snapshot.” Intergenerational mobility and “equality of opportunity”, so the argument goes, is what matters for normative evaluation. In response to...

The academic literature on equality of opportunity has burgeoned. More recently, the concepts and measures have begun to be used by policy institutions, including in specific sectors like health and education. Indeed, it is argued that one advantage of focusing on equality of opportunity is that...

We address the issue of social distribution of an aggregate risk (on agricultural export price), from a macroeconomic perspective. Individual incomes in representative social groups are computed as a function of export prices, which are assumed to be stochastic, using an applied general...

In this paper, we demonstrate how age-adjusted inequality measures can be used to evaluate whether changes in inequality over time are due to changes in the age-structure. To this end, we use administrative data on earnings for every male Norwegian over the period 1967-2000. We find that the...

Economists tend to agree that international trade liberalization brings significant gains from trade to countries engaging in such a process. At the same time however, public opinion is much less optimistic and there is a widespread concern that the current sharing of the gains from trade is...

We assume that individuals can fully insure themselves against cross-country shocks, but not against individual-specific shocks. We consider two particular models of limited risk-sharing: domestically incomplete markets (DI) and private information-Pareto optimal (PIPO) risk-sharing. For each...

This Paper studies the optimal education policy in the presence of different groups of households, with groups differing in the distribution of the ability to benefit from education. The main result is that the high ability individuals from groups with relatively few high ability individuals...