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 develops a micro-econometric method to account for differences across distributions of household income. Going beyond the determination of earnings in labor markets, we also estimate statistical models for occupational choice and for the conditional distributions of education,...

Does more education really mean less poverty and less inequality? How much less? What are the transmission mechanisms? This paper presents the results of a micro-simulation exercise for the Brazilian State of Ceará, which suggests that broad-based policies aimed at increasing educational...

This paper departs from John Roemer's formulation of the theory of equality of opportunities. It seeks to determine what part of observed outcome inequality may be attributed to differences in observed 'circumstances', including family background, and what part is due to 'personal efforts'. We...

We provide, for the class of relative bidimensional inequality indices, adecomposition of inequality into two univariate Atkinson-Kolm-Senindices and a third statistic which depends on the joint distribution ofresources

The amp;apos'prediction approachamp;apos' proposed by Dearden, Machin and Reed (DMR) consists in (1) regressing the observed incomes of the child and parent families on separate sets of predetermined variables, and (2) regressing the childamp;apos's predicted income on that of the parents....

Averaging methods are routinely used in order to limit biases resulting from the mismeasurement of permanent incomes. The Solon/Zimmerman estimator regresses a single-year measurement of the childamp;apos's resources on a T-period average of the parentsamp;apos' income while the Behrman/Taubman...

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...