In many countries extreme poverty is unnecessary. Yet it persists. We propose a simple index, denoted the Miser index, to measure the extent to which societies have poverty in the midst of affluence. It builds on the generalized Lorenz curve, but can also be seen as a measure of polarization...

It is often argued that projects involving public good changes should be chosen on the basis of monetary valuation and cost-benefit analysis (CBA). In democratic project selection processes, however, decision-makers cannot generally interpret CBA as measuring projects' social welfare effects....

This paper discusses the concept of resourcism' as an alternative to the capability approach. It argues that the term economic resources covers too many different concepts for the term resourcism to be useful when analysing distributional justice. In particular, the resourcism of Dworkin is...

This paper has a twofold purpose. It argues firstly, that analysis of income distribution should be a part of the capability approach. Secondly, it argues that the capability approach is a good theoretical foundation for analysis of income distribution. The capability approach to human advantage...

The time series nature of repeated surveys is seldom taken into account. The few studies that take this into account usually smooth the period-wise estimates without using the cross sectional information. This leads to inefficient estimation. I present a statistical model of repeated surveys and...

Many developed countries currently consider a move towards a universal child care program. The challenge in assessing the case for universal child care programs is that the evidence base is scarce. We analyze the staged expansion of subsidized, universally accessible child care in Norway. Our...

No voters cast their votes based on perfect information, but better educated and richer voters are on average better informed than others. We develop a model where the voting mistakes resulting from low political knowledge reduce the weight of poor voters, and cause parties to choose political...

Political economy models predict that the rich oppose redistribution, and hence vote for conservative parties. Although this seems to fit the data well, I show that this is not true when we control for unobservable characteristics. Using Norwegian survey data, I study to what extent voting is...

I study to what extent voters are forward looking and how future income affects the voting decision. Particularly, I estimate the effect of both transitory and permanent income on preferences for different parties using a panel data set from the Norwegian Election Study. To construct a proxy for...

I study the effect of voters with a group-based social conscience. Voters then care more about the well-being of those belonging to their own group than the rest of the population. Within a model of political tax determination, both fractionalization and group antagonism reduce the support for...