Social stress can cause physical and mental harm. It is therefore not surprising that public health policy makers have sought to identify and implement policies aimed at tackling this social ill. A frequently prescribed remedy is to reduce social stress by reducing income inequality, which is...

This paper presents a life cycle model for the demand for health, and derives empirical specifications that distinguish between permanent and transitory wage responses. Using panel data, we estimate dynamic health and health input demand equations. We find evidence of negative transitory wage...

This short essay reviews Gary Becker's contributions and influence in health economics. It was originally prepared for the collection of short papers in honor of Gary Becker that is scheduled to appear in the inaugural issue of the Journal of Demographic Economics.

In this paper we evaluate the QALY losses, which are linked to the prevalence of specific chronic illnesses and impediments. The analysis is based on the individual self-rating health satisfaction question asked in the British Household Panel Survey data set. Our method is a refinement of the...

This paper develops a criterion to assess equalization of opportunity that is consistent with theoretical views of equality of opportunity. We characterize inequality of opportunity as a situation where some groups in society enjoy an illegitimate advantage. In this context, equalization of...

In this paper, we analyze the extent to which market forces create an incentive for cloning human beings. We show that a market for cloning arises if a large enough fraction of the clone?s income can be appropriated by its model. Only people with the highest ability are cloned, while people at...

The evolution of the ratio of direct taxation (characterized by progressive rates) over indirect and payroll taxation (characterized by flat rates) is examined together with its distributional consequences for the Bottom 50%, Middle 40% and Top 10% shares of income. Oscillations of this ratio...

Existing tax schedules are often overly complex and characterized by discontinuities in the marginal tax burden. In this paper we propose a class of progressive smooth functions to replace personal income tax schedules. These functions depend only on three meaningful parameters, and avoid the...

In recent decades, most developed countries have experienced a simultaneous increase in income inequality and management compensation. In this paper, we study the relation between management compensation and firm-level income dynamics in a general equilibrium model. Empirical estimation, of the...

We examine the socially optimal wealth distribution in a two-person two-good model with heterogeneous workers and asymmetric social interactions where only one (social) individual derives positive or negative utility from the leisure of the other (non-social) individual. We show that the...