We consider a two-person Cournot game of voluntary contributions to a public good with identical individual preferences, and examine equilibrium aggregate welfare under a separable, symmetric and concave social welfare function. Assuming the public good is pure, Itaya, de Meza and Myles (Econ....

The Gini coefficient features prominently in Amartya Sen's 1973 and 1997 seminal work on income inequality and social welfare. We construct the Gini coefficient from socialpsychological building blocks, reformulating it as a ratio between a measure of social stress and aggregate income. We...

This paper analyzes the intra-household distribution of wealth and welfare in the United States, within a theoretical framework based on a collective model of labor supply, where household decisions are Pareto efficient, and spouses negotiate a sharing rule for non-labor income. Using the...

High-skilled workers are four times more likely to migrate than low-skilled workers. This skill bias in migration – often called brain drain – has been at the center of a heated debate about the welfare consequences of emigration from developing countries. In this paper, we provide a global...

Using plausibly exogenous variations in the ethnicity-specific assigned birth quotas and different fertility penalties across Chinese provinces over time, we provide new evidence for the transferable utility model by showing how China's One-Child Policy induced a significantly higher unmarried...

We study welfare effects of public short-time compensation (STC) in a model in which firms respond to idiosyncratic profitability shocks by adjusting employment and hours per worker. Introducing STC substantially improves welfare by mitigating distortions caused by public unemployment insurance...

This paper quantitatively determines the asset limit in income support programs which minimizes consumption volatility in a lifecycle model with incomplete markets and idiosyncratic earnings risk. An asset limit allows allocating transfers to those households with the highest utility gains from...

In this paper we develop theoretical criteria and econometric methods to rank policy interventions in terms of welfare when individuals are loss-averse. The new criterion for "loss aversion-sensitive dominance" defines a weak partial ordering of the distributions of policy-induced gains and...

Income mobility is often thought to equalize permanent incomes and thereby to improve social welfare. The welfare analysis of mobility often fails, however, to account for the cost of the variability of periodic incomes around permanent incomes. This paper assesses the net welfare benefit of...

We show that the welfare of a country's infinitely-lived representative consumer is summarized, to a first order, by total factor productivity and by the capital stock per capita. These variables suffice to calculate welfare changes within a country, as well as welfare differences across...