Individual income is determined by free-will actions related to the level of effort exerted and by opportunities determined by aspects beyond the individual's control, such as family background, race, place of birth or health endowments. Taking human capital as the main engine of development, we...

This chapter of the forthcoming Handbook of Law and Economics surveys the theory of the public enforcement of law %u2013 the use of governmental agents (regulators, inspectors, tax auditors, police, prosecutors) to detect and to sanction violators of legal rules. The theoretical core of our...

In Fairness versus Welfare, we advance the thesis that social policies should be assessed based entirely on their effects on individuals' well-being. This thesis implies that no independent weight should be accorded to notions of fairness (other than many purely distributive notions). We support...

The public at large, many policymakers, and some economists hold views of social welfare that attach some importance to factors other than individuals' utilities. This note shows that any such non-individualistic notion of social welfare conflicts with the Pareto principle.

Conventional wisdom predicts that changes in macroeconomic conditions significantly affect income inequality. In this paper we hypothesize that the way in which macroeconomic conditions affect inequality depends on how these conditions influence the constituents of total inequality: inequality...

Using family income from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), we apply Quantile Regression to estimate the Intergenerational Income Elasticity (IGE) by percentiles in the U.S. from 1980 to 2010. For the whole period, the IGE shows a Ushape across the income distribution, with maximum...