This paper adds to our understanding of the causes of income inequality across nations by examining the influence of different aspects of gender equality or female empowerment. Whereas the economics of income inequality has been an area of active academic inquiry, the role of gender equality has...

We solve the non-linear income tax program for a rank-dependent social welfare function à la Yaari, expressing the trade-off between size and inequality using the Gini or related families of positional indices. The key idea is that when agents optimize and absent bunching, ranks in the actual...

We show how normative standpoints determine optimal taxation of wealth. Since wealth is not equal to capital, we find very different welfare implications of land rent-, bequest- and capital taxation. It is mainly land rents that should be taxed. We develop an overlapping generations model with...

We propose and axiomatically characterize a family of welfare criteria that prioritize individuals making larger sacrifices. By combining efficiency with a concern for equality of sacrifice, our criteria avoid serious shortcomings of utilitarianism. We illustrate our results within the...

We offer a new explanation for why taxes have become less progressive in many countries in parallel with an increase in income inequality. When performance-based compensation differentials are needed to incentivize effort, redistribution through progressive income taxes becomes less precisely...

The social cost of carbon is the central economic measure for aggregate climate change damages and functions as a metric for optimal carbon prices. Previous literature shows that inequality significantly influences the level of the social cost of carbon, but mostly neglects a major source of...

In his thought-provoking book What Money Can't Buy. The Moral Limits of Markets, Sandel (2012) claims that some nonmarket ways of allocating goods, such as the ethics of the queue (first come, first served), are gradually being displaced by the ethics of the market. He highlights inequality as...

We consider optimal non-linear income tax problems when the social welfare function only depends on ranks as in Yaari (1987) and weights agree with the Lorenz quasi-ordering. Gini, S-Gini, and a class putting more emphasis on inequality in the upper part of the distribution belong to this set....