Increasing wage inequality is a feature of many economies in recent years, and the same is true of China. Whereas in most countries it is normally interpreted as a move from one market equilibrium to another, in China it is more likely to reflect a move away from extreme disequilibirum. Two...

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 -...

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...

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...

We propose to measure inequality of well-being with a multidimensional generalization of the Gini coefficient.  We derive two inequality indices from their underlying social evaluation functions.  These functions are conceived as a double aggregation functions: one across the dimensions of...

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...