Workers' social identity affects their choice of occupation, and therefore the structure and prosperity of the aggregate economy. This paper studies this phenomenon in a setting where work and identity are particularly intertwined: the Indian caste system. Using a new dataset that combines...

This paper evaluates the global welfare consequences of increases in mortality and poverty generated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Increases in mortality are measured in terms of the number of years of life lost (LY) to the pandemic. Additional years spent in poverty (PY) are conservatively...

There is growing support for the idea that global income poverty should be assessed with a measure accounting for both own income and relative income. The trade-off that such a measure makes between own income and relative income is the key question. Non-paternalism requires that this trade-off...

This paper studies the optimal taxation of bequests in a model in which agents have heterogeneous preferences over their consumption and the net-of-tax bequest received by their heir. The bequest left by an individual depends on both her degree of altruism and the bequest received from her...

This paper reviews the debate opposing the absolute and relative approaches to monetary poverty measurement. The arguments for combining both approaches into a single "overall” monetary poverty measure are introduced. The most salient proposals of hybrid poverty lines are presented. Then, the...

Simple welfare indices such as mean income are ubiquitous but not distribution sensitive. In contrast, existing distribution sensitive welfare indices are rarely used, often because they are difficult to explain and/or lack intuitive units. This paper proposes a simple new distribution sensitive...