Based on theoretical models of budget-balanced social insurance and individual choice, we argue that in addition to the well-known empathy mechanism whereby ethnic heterogeneity undermines sentiments of solidarity among a citizenry to reduce welfare generosity, population heterogeneity affects...

This forthcoming chapter in the Handbook of Income Distribution (eds., A. Atkinson and F. Bourguignon) summarizes the literature on equality of opportunity. We begin by reviewing the philosophical debate concerning equality since Rawls (sections 1 and 2), present economic algorithms for...

Although evidence accrues in biology, anthropology and experimental economics that homo sapiens is a cooperative species, the reigning assumption in economic theory is that individuals optimize in an autarkic manner (as in Nash and Walrasian equilibrium). I here postulate a cooperative kind of...

In light of the shortage of healthcare professionals, many developing countries operate a defacto two-tiered system of healthcare provision, in which Community Health Workers (CHWs) supplement service provision by fully qualified physicians. CHWs are relatively inexpensive to train but can treat...

Mankind must cooperate to reduce GHG emissions to prevent a catastrophic rise in global temperature. How can the necessary costs of reducing GHG emissions be allocated across regions of the world, within the next few generations, and simultaneously address growth expectations and economic...

Although evidence accrues in biology, anthropology and experimental economics that homo sapiens is a cooperative species, the reigning assumption in economic theory is that individuals optimize in an autarkic manner (as in Nash and Walrasian equilibrium). I here postulate an interdependent kind...

We calibrate a sequence of four nested models to study the dynamics of wealth accumulation. Individuals maximize a utility function whose arguments are consumption and investment. They desire to accumulate wealth for its own sake — this is not a life-cycle model. A competitive firm produces a...

A brief, historical review of the study of the interdependency between politics and economic distribution is offered. While the impact of economic interests on politics has been acknowledged for thousands of years, and the impact of politics on distribution for hundreds, it is only in the last...

We survey critically the brief history of modeling party competition in general elections, beginning with the Hotelling-Downs model with a unidimensional policy space, and the Wittman model with endogenous parties, to the multi-dimensional citizen-candidate and PUNE models. Some applications of...

In a citizen candidate equilibrium, there are n candidates each of whom announces a policy in a policy space of dimension d. Thus the policy equilibrium lives in a space of dimension nd. We show, in a canonical example, that the equilibrium manifold is generically of dimension nd. In particular,...