In this paper, we revisit the association between happiness and inequality. We argue that the interaction between the perceived and the actual fairness of the income generation process affects this association. Building on a simple model of individual labor-market participation under...

We develop a model that allows for public goods and status signaling through charitable contributions. This model provides a unified framework in which contributions are driven both by altruism and status signaling. We use this setup to re-examine the conventional practice of rendering a...

We illustrate a novel informational feature of education, which the government may utilize. Discretionary decisions of individuals to acquire education may serve as an additional signal (to earned labor income) on the underlying unobserved innate earning ability, thereby mitigating the...

We consider the notion of welfare stigma à la Besley and Coate (1992b). This stigma is attributed to welfare claimants by society when they are perceived as undeserving in the sense that they falsely claim to be eligible for welfare benefits. However, due to imperfect information, this stigma...

This paper studies the aggregate and distributional implications of introducing user fees for publicly provided excludable public goods into a model with consumption and income taxes. The setup is a neoclassical growth model where agents differ in earnings and second-best policy is chosen by a...

It is argued that the concept of well –being inequality cannot be properly defined without taking the referencing process into account. The reference effect depends on how frequently individuals compare with others and on the degree of social transparency in society. In this paper we employ...

Averaging methods are routinely used in order to limit biases resulting from the mismeasurement of permanent incomes. The Solon/Zimmerman estimator regresses a single-year measurement of the child's resources on a T-period average of the parents' income while the Behrman/Taubman estimator...