Wildman (2021), who identifies "a clear association between income inequality [measured by the Gini coefficient] and COVID-19 cases and deaths," concludes that "a goal of government should be to reduce [income] inequalities and [thereby] improve [the COVID-19 outcomes /] underlying health of...

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...

We consider a tax-funded policy of admitting and integrating asylum seekers in a country in which the incomes of the native inhabitants are differentiated; for the sake of simplicity, we assume that there are just two groups of native inhabitants: high-income natives and low-income natives. As a...

Combining a standard measure of concern about low relative wealth and a standard measure of relative risk aversion leads to a novel explanation of variation in risk-taking behavior identified and documented by social psychologists and economists. We obtain two results: (1) Holding individual i's...

Assuming that an individual's rank in the wealth distribution is the only factor determining the individual's wellbeing, we analyze the individual's risk preferences in relation to gaining or losing rank, rather than the individual's risk preferences towards gaining or losing absolute wealth. We...

Drawing on a model in which utility is derived from consumption and effort (labor supply), we ask how the deportation of a number of undocumented migrants influences the decisions regarding labor supply, consumption, and savings of the remaining undocumented migrants. We assume that the...

We link causally the riskiness of men's management of their finances with the probability of their experiencing a divorce. Our point of departure is that when comparing single men to married men, the former manage their finances in a more aggressive (that is, riskier) manner. Assuming that...

We offer an explanation for the inconclusive results of empirical studies into the relationship between the magnitude of the Gini coefficient of income distribution at origin and the intensity of migration. Bearing in mind the substantial literature that identifies relative deprivation as an...

We show that a social planner who seeks to allocate a given sum in order to reduce efficiently the social stress of a population, as measured by the aggregate relative deprivation of the population, pursues a disbursement procedure that is identical to the procedure adhered to by a Rawlsian...

This paper tracks the consequences of individuals' desire to align their location with their social preferences. The social preference studied in the paper is distaste for relative deprivation, measured in a cardinal manner. Location is conceived as social space, with individuals choosing to...