The question of choice, in Hume's works, lies within the more general framework of the theory of passions. These lead towards desire, aversion and volition, and require reason, as a cognitive faculty, in order to build the set of objects on which our preferences are defined, and to determine its...

The purpose of the paper is to highlight the role of economists in the institutional building of the electric systems in the first part of the twentieth century. It aims at showing how the organization of electricity sector and its regulation were largely the fruits of the economists' works not...

Lynn Stout's paper develops an insightful legal-economic analysis of speculative trading. From one hand, the paper discusses the legal-economic framework of speculation and its recent transformation, making reference to the case of derivatives markets crash (and related financial crisis) of...

We provide the first theoretical analysis of altruism in networks. Agents are embedded in a fixed, weighted network and care about their direct friends. Given some initial distribution of incomes, they may decide to support their poorer friends. We study the resulting non-cooperative transfer...

This paper uses data from the Luxembourg Income Study to examine some of the forces that have driven changes in household income inequality over the last three decades of the 20th century. We decompose inequality for 6 countries (Canada, Germany, Norway, Sweden, the UK, and the US) into the...

Our paper contributes by bridging the gap between the (partial equilibrium) microsimulation and the computable general equilibrium (CGE) approaches, by making use of exact aggregation results from the discrete choice literature: heterogeneous individuals choosing within a set of discrete...

Under the the assumption that income y is a power function of its rank among n individuals, we approximate the coefficient of variation and gini index as functions of the power degree of the Pen's parade. Reciprocally, for a given coefficient of variation or gini index, we propose the analytic...

Despite the dramatic reduction of poverty in China over the past thirty-five years, poverty has not been fully eradicated in rural areas, and in the context of growing inequalities, it remains a national concern. This paper examines a local cash-for-work program launched in mountainous areas of...

Using a new set of micro evidence from an original survey of 28 transition countries, we show that democracy increases citizens' support for the market by guaranteeing income redistribution to inequality-averse agents. Our identification strategy relies on the restriction of the sample to...

Building on the existing literature, a synthetic approach intended to ease the understanding of the notion of inequality of opportunity is developed. In turn, this paper tests a convincing hypothesis explaining the mixed evidence found by empirical studies regarding the instrumental effect of...