This paper formulates a simple skill and education model to explain how better access to higher education leads to stronger assortative mating on skills of parents and more polarized skill and earnings distributions of children. Swedish data show that in the second half of the 20th century more...

This paper provides new insights on the importance of family background by linking 1.7 million Dutch children's incomes to an exceptionally rich set of family characteristics - including income, wealth, education, occupation, crime, and health. Using a machine learning approach, I show that...

When income inequality increases when average income levels increase, rises in average income levels might result in inequality costs. This paper develops marginal social welfare measures that account for the possibility that income inequality changes when average income levels change....

We argue that promoting education may be a means to reduceincome inequality. When workers of different skill levels areimperfect substitutes in production, an increase in the level ofhuman capital in the economy reduces the return to education.Hence, a given compression of after-tax incomes can...

Meritocratic fairness justifies inequality when it stems from performance. Yet performance is influenced by one's genetics. I investigate whether individuals' redistribution preferences are affected by their beliefs about genetics' role in generating performance inequality. In an incentivized...

We study the evolution of voter support for climate policies aimed at containing the effect of climate risk, as weather conditions worsens at a time of rising economic inequality. Households differ in age, beliefs and income, and the scale of intervention to preserve habitable land reflects the...

We estimate responsibility-sensitive welfare weights for health that facilitate inequalityand inequity-sensitive policy evaluation. In a UK general population sample, 569 online experiment participants distribute constrained resources to determine the health of hypothetical individuals...

We design a novel experiment to identify aversion to pure (univariate) health inequality separately from aversion to income-related and income-caused health inequality. Participants allocate resources to determine health of individuals. Identification comes from random variation in resource...

A model is developed for peasant households in land abundant areas who choose between two technologies for land preparation: a manual one and one using draught animals. For draught a minimum number of animals is required so that a technological non convexity exists. It follows that certain...