The empirical literature on the economics of happiness has grown rapidly, and much has been learned about the determinants of subjective well-being.  Less attention has been paid to its normative implications.  Taking China as a case study, this paper first summarises empirical results on the...

Teams are becoming increasingly important in work settings.  We develop a framework to study the strategic implications of a meritocratic notion of desert under which team members care about receiving what they feel they deserve.  Team members find it painful to receive less than their...

In many economic applications involving comparisons of multivariate distributions, supermodularity of an objective function is a natural property for capturing a preference for greater interdependence.  One multivariate distribution dominates another according to the supermodular stochastic...

This paper investigates recent advances in our understanding of the global distribution of income, and produces the first estimates of global inequality that take into account data on the incomes of the top one percent within countries.  We discuss conceptual and methodological issues -...

We analyse intertemporal poverty in two important dimensions - income and nutrition - in less developed northwest China during 2000-2004.  A generalised recursive selection model is proposed which enables simultaneous estimation of the causes of intertemporal poverty within and between...

Two essential intuitions about the concept of multidimensional inequality have been highlighted in the emerging body of literature on this subject: first, multidimensional inequality should be a function of the uniform inequality of a multivariate distribution of goods or attributes across...

Ultimatum games have been extensively used in experimental studies. By studying the consequences that restrictions shared by ultimatum games have in subject`s behaviour, this paper argues that some results are falsified by design constraints. This paper also presets a taxonomy of certification,...

This paper studies the ethical underpinnings of two social criteria which are prominent in the literature dealing with the problem of evaluating allocations of several consumption goods in a population with heterogeneous preferences. The Pazner-Schmeidler criterion (Pazner-Schmeidler [22]) and...

Using a South African data set, the paper poses six questions about the determinants of subjective well-being. Much of the paper is concerned with the role of relative concepts. We find that comparator income – measured as average income of others in the local residential cluster - enters the...

Specific functional forms are often used in economic models of distributions; goodness-of-fit measures are used to assess whether a functional form is appropriate in the light of real-world data.  Standard approaches use a distance criterion based on the EDF, an aggregation of differences in...