Why do some people become entrepreneurs, how do institutions affect this choice, and how does this affect the firm size distribution and aggregate productivity? This paper addresses this question using a matching model with occupational choice and heterogeneity in both ability as a worker and ex...

This paper examines the implications of intergenerational transfers of time and money for labor supply and capital accumulation.

This paper examines the implications of intergenerational transfers of time and money for labor supply and capital accumulation. Although intergenerational transfers of time in the form of grandparenting are as substantial as monetary transfers in the data, little is known about the role and...

Due to meteorological factors, the distribution of the environmental damage due to climate change bears no relationship to that of global emissions. We argue in favor of offsetting this discrepancy, and propose a “global insurance scheme” to be financed according to countries’...

Ranking development programs using integrals of discounted utilities can yield drastic consequences that offend our sense of justice. New alternative social welfare criteria should be considered. A reaction to discounted utilitarianism is to moderate its effects by adding to the social welfare...

We examine the measurement of individual poverty in an intertemporal context. In contrast to earlier contributions, we assign importance to the persistence in a state of poverty and we characterize a class of individual intertemporal poverty measures reflecting this feature. In addition, we...

In many economic environments - such as college admissions, student placements at public schools, and university housing allocation - indivisible objects with capacity constraints are assigned to a set of agents when each agent receives at most one object and monetary compensations are not...

We study the problem of defining inequality-averse social orderings over the space of allocations in a multi-commodity environment where individuals differ only in their preferences. We formulate notions of egalitarianism based on the axiom that any dominance between the consumption bundles of...