We propose a methodology to evaluate social projects from an (equality of) opportunity perspective by looking at their effect on (parts of) the distribution of outcomes conditional on morally irrelevant characteristics, taken here to be parental education level and indigenous background. The...

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

In this paper we consider a model with multiple jurisdictions where each formed jurisdiction selects a public project from the given uni-dimensional set, equally shares its cost among its members and places the project at the location of its median resident. We examine a cooperative concept of...

In this note we consider a society that partitions itself into disjoint jurisdictions, each choosing a location of its public project and a taxation scheme to finance it. The set of public project is multi-dimensional, and their costs could vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. We impose two...

We show that the simple fact that a monopolist sells a good in units whichare indivisible may we induce him to select a quality for his product which is not the highest one, even if no cost of any sort is attached to quality improvement.

This paper focuses on Social Security benefit claiming behavior, a take-up decision that has been ignored in the previous literature. Using financial calculations and simulations based on an expected utility maximization model, we show that delaying benefit claim for a period of time after...

This paper examines the impact on old age poverty and the fiscal cost of universal minimum old age pensions in Latin America using recent household survey data for 18 countries. Alleviating old age poverty requires different approach from other age groups and a minimum pension is likely to be...

We consider a model where agents differ in their preferences about consumption labor and health, in their (health-dependent) earning ability, and in their health disposition. We study the joint taxation of income and health expenditure, under incentive-compatibility constraints, on the basis of...