This paper provides a cardinal welfare measure for the allocation of a bundle of goods among a group of people. Social welfare is measured as the sum of n partial indices, one for each good, each of which consists of a function of the amount of the good availabe and its dispersion, measured by...

Standard models of intertemporal allocation predict that the time path of expenditures should beindependent of the time path of income. Recently two papers, Parker (1999) and Souleles (1999)have suggested that U.S. households have a high marginal propensity to spend within yearanticipated income...

This paper provides a comparative analysis of some classical solutions to bankruptcy problems from an axiomatic viewpoint. These rules are the constrained equal-awards rule, the constrained equal-losses rule, the proportional rule and the Talmud rule. The purpose of this study is to facilitate...

This paper analyzes a family of solutions to bankruptcy problems that generalizes the Talmud rule (T) and encompasses both the constrained equal-awards rule (A) and the constrained equal-losses rule (L). We study the structural properties of this family of rules and provide a characterization...

This paper introduces the notion of Market Equilibrium With Active Consumers (MEWAC), in order to characterize the efficiency of market outcomes in production economies. We show that, no matter the behaviour followed by the firms, a market equilibrium is efficient if it is a MEWAC. And also that...

Fighting poverty is one of the main goals in the most societies. This is usually done by the transferring resources to the poor. There exists a widespread view that the European countries are more generous to the poor than the United States. We study whether this is really the case. Firts we...

This paper attempts to detect the existence of links in consumptionpreferences between generations. Preferences for consumption goods may bedetermined by the preferences of parents (vertical transmission) and/or bypreferences arising from the environment (horizontal transmission). Wepropose an...

This paper analyzes the existence of efficient equilibrium allocations in an economy with many convex and non-convex firms. A Social Equilibrium is defined as a price vector and an allocation satisfying the following properties: a) Consumers satisfy their preferences, subject to their budget...

The purpose of this paper is to offer an exposition of the results on the existence and optimality of equilibria when production sets are not assumed to be convex, in a general equilibrium framework. We aim at providing a formal and systematic account of the main results available, rather than...

This paper examines the empirical relevance of an intertemporal model of consumption with dynamically inconsistent decision makers. The model has testable implications concerning the relation between the consumers' degrees of short-run patience (self-control) and their consumption-saving...