We augment a standard tax model by concerns about tax equity: people get upset when labour is taxed more heavily than capital. Even the slightest concern for tax equity invalidates the common recommendation for small open economies that capital should remain tax-exempt. This holds for exogenous...

In this paper, we revisit the association between happiness and inequality. We argue that the interaction between the perceived and the actual fairness of the income generation process affects this association. Building on a simple model of individual labor-market participation under...

We examine whether belief-based preferences - caring about what transgressors believe - play a crucial role in punishment decisions: Do punishers want to make sure that transgressors understand why they are being punished, and is this desire to affect beliefs often prioritized over distributive...

The internet has given birth to an expanding number of shared virtual reality spaces, with a collective population well into the millions. These virtual worlds exhibit most of the traits we associate with the Earth world: economic transactions, interpersonal relationships, organic political...

This paper is based on the ideas of political philosopher John Rawls who suggested that a just society is one which would be created behind a “veil of ignorance”, that is to say, without knowing where one would end up in the society’s distribution of talent and other attributes valued in...

Although measures of sensitivity to inequality are important in judging the welfare effects of health-care programmes, it is far from straightforward how to elicit them and apply them in health-care decision making. This paper provides an overview of the literature on the measurement of...

The study of optimal long-term care (LTC) social insurance is generally carried out under the utilitarian social criterion, which penalizes individuals who have a lower capacity to convert resources into well-being, such as dependent elderly individuals or prematurely dead individuals. This...

Filing income tax returns or insurance claims often requires that individuals comply with complex rules to meet their obligations. We present evidence from a laboratory tax experiment suggesting that the effects of complexity on compliance are intrinsically linked to distributive fairness. We...

We discuss public pension systems in a multi-period overlapping generations model with gerontologically founded human aging and a special focus on occupation-specific morbidity and mortality. We examine how distinct replacement rates for white-collar and blue-collar workers and early retirement...