This paper explores the extent to which the presence of ex-ante transaction costs may lead to failures of the Coase Theorem. In particular we identify and investigate the basic 'hold-up problem' which arises whenever the parties to a Coasian negotiation have to pay some ex-ante costs for the...

This paper proposes a method to decompose earnings inequality into a component due to unequal opportunities and a residual term. Drawing on the distinction between 'circumstance' and 'effort' variables in John Roemer's work on equality of opportunity, we associate inequality of opportunities...

We examine the relationship between risk analysis and inequality analysis, using a questionnaire-experimental approach .The experiments focus on the effect of income transformations on the perceived rankings of income distributions in either a risk or inequality context. Both context and income...

This paper investigates possible explanations for the increases in inequality observed in Brazil during the 1980s. While the static decompositions of inequality by household characteristics reveal that education and race of the household head, as well as geographic location, can account for a...

Inequality measurement involves explicit or implicit value judgements. The subjective approach to inequality measurement is a relatively new and fast-developing area which focueses direct attention on these judgements. It is amp;apos'subjectiveamp;apos' in the sense that it takes accounts of...

We establish a general relationship between the standard form of the individualistic social-welfare function and the ?reduced-form? version that is expressed in terms of inequality and mean income. This shows the relationship between the property of monotonicity and the slope of the...

We examine the way in which across-the-board additions to incomes are perceived to change inequality. Using a questionnaire we investigate whether subjective inequality rankings correspond to the principle of scale-independence of translation-independence, or to some generalised concept of...

Using a newly available comprehensive micro-data set we examine changes in the shape of the Brazilian income distribution during the quot;lost decadequot; of the 1980s. We adopt alternative parametric and non-parametric approaches to modelling the distribution. We show that inequality changed...