This paper analyzes behaviour on a TV game show where players' monetary payoffs depend upon an array of factors, including ability in answering questions, perceived cooperativeness and the willingness of other players to choose them. We find a substantial beauty premium and are able to...

The prevailing labour market models assume that minimum wages do not affect the labour supply schedule. We challenge this view in this paper by showing experimentally that minimum wages have significant and lasting effects on subjects’ reservation wages. The temporary introduction of a minimum...

This paper studies the effects of progressive income taxes and education finance in a dynamic heterogeneous agent economy. Such redistributive policies entail distortions to labour supply and savings, but also serve as partial substitutes for missing credit and insurance markets. The resulting...

The objective of this research is to document and to explain trends in inequality in 20th century France. Data from income tax returns (1915-98), wage tax returns (1919-98) and inheritance tax returns (1902-94), is used in order to compute fully homogeneous, yearly estimates of income...

This paper examines how the level and dispersion of self-reported happiness has evolved over the period 1972-2006. While there has been no increase in aggregate happiness, inequality in happiness has fallen substantially since the 1970s. There have been large changes in the level of happiness...

This paper investigates whether individual decisions lead to equality of opportunity in education, defined in the specific sense of irrelevance of parental income for university attendance. We show that, even if households can borrow in the capital market, the laissez-faire equilibrium exhibits...

This Paper presents data on the evolution of top incomes and wages from 1956 to 2000 in India using individual tax returns data. Our data shows that the shares of the top 0.01%, the top 0.1% and the top 1% in total income shrank very substantially until the early-to-mid 1980s, but then went back...

Wealthy individuals often voluntarily provide public goods that the poor also consume. Such philanthropy is perceived as legitimizing one’s wealth. Governments routinely exempt the rich from taxation on grounds of their charitable expenditure. We examine the normative logic of this exemption....

Efficient measures are often not implemented because of their potentially damaging effects on distribution, yet these distributional effects are scarcely studied in economics because of the idea that they are case specific. In this paper we show that when we can separate the effect on efficiency...