Comparative static properties of the solution to an optimal nonlinear income tax problem are provided for a model in which the government both designs a redistributive income tax schedule and provides a public input into a nonlinear production process. These assumptions imply that wage rates are...

The impacts of changing the number of individuals of a particular skill level on the solutions to two versions of the finite population optimal nonlinear income tax problem are investigated. In one version, preferences are quasilinear-in-leisure. For this version, it is shown that it is possible...

In this article, the joint use of an income tax and public provision of education as instruments to achieve the government's distributional objectives are considered. Individuals differ in innate labour productivity and in aptitude to acquire skills through education. Actual labour productivity...

A voting procedure is candidate stable if no candidate would prefer to withdraw from an election when all of the other potential candidates enter. Dutta, Jackson, and Le Breton have recently established a number of theorems showing that candidate stability is incompatible with some other...

Arrow's axioms for social welfare functions are shown to be inconsistent when the set of alternatives is the nonnegative orthant in a multidimensional Euclidean space and preferences are assumed to be either the set of analytic classical economic preferences or the set of Euclidean spatial...

For exchange economies with classical economic preferences, it is shown that any strategy-proof social choice function that selects Pareto optimal outcomes cannot guarantee everyone a consumption bundle bounded away from the origin. This result demonstrates that there is a fundamental conflict...

A desirable property of a voting procedure is that it be immune to the strategic withdrawal of a cadidate for election. Dutta, Jackson, and Le Breton (Econometrica,2001) have established a number of theorems which demonstrate that this condition is incompatible with some other desirable...

Serge Kolm's "epistemic counterfactual principle" says that a social choice only needs to be made from the actual feasible set of alternatives given the actual preference profile, but it must be justified by the choices that would have been made in appropriate counterfactual choice situations....

This article reconsiders the Harsanyi--Sen debate concerning whether Harsanyi is justified in interpreting his Aggregation and Impartial Observer Theorems as providing axiomatizations of utilitarianism. Sen's criticism and its formalization by Weymark are based on the claim that von...

This article considers the ranking of profiles of opportunity sets on the basis of their equality. A version of the Pigou-Dalton transfer principle that is appropriate for the measurement of opportunity inequality is introduced and used to axiomatize the class of generalized Gini equality of...