We characterize two different approaches to the idea of equality of opportunity. Roemer's social ordering is motivated by a concern to compensate for the effects of certain (non-responsibility) factors on outcomes. Van de gaer's social ordering is concerned with the equalization of the...

To take into account heterogeneity in a social welfare function, Ebert (1997) and Shorrocks (1995) show that the only consistent way of welfare measurement consists of either constructing an artificial distribution in which each household is weighted by the number of equivalent individuals, or...

Besley (1988) is one of the few exceptional articles containing non-welfarist optimal tax devices. Feehan(1990) reports an error in his first-best rules. The present note criticizes the fundamentals of Besley's second-best rules. These rules optimize the welfare or well-being of phantom agents...

We characterize a family of r-extended generalized Lorenz dominance quasi-orderings and a family of r-Gini welfare orderings, on the basis of two allegedly "incompatible" axioms for heterogeneous welfare comparisons (Ebert, 1997, Ebert and Moyes, 2003, Shorrocks, 1995), but at the cost of either...

I survey the results of empirical research, showing that the opinions about distributive justice of the population at large are in sharp conflict with the assumptions of traditional welfare economics. I focus on the results concerning welfarism and concerning the Pigou-Dalton transfer criterion....

This paper explores the link between the measurement of intergenerational mobility and the notion of equality of opportunity. We show how recently proposed theories of equality of opportunity can be meaningfully adapted to the intergenerational context. This throws a new light on the...

This paper tries to bridge part of the gap between the theoretical model of mixed altruism and the empirical research on charitable behaviour. We use questionnaire data on charitable donations from a representative sample of the Flemish population. We link interindividual differences in...

Non-radial measures of technical efficiency essentially differ from their radial counterparts in that the product mix of the efficient reference is allowed to be different from the product mix of the evaluated observation. Whereas existing non-radial measures are still based on the product mix...

We argue that efficiency assessments of academic research should focus on micro-units of research production rather than on conventionally employed (aggregated) macro-units, and show that such a detailed analysis of research performance provides interesting insights. In addition, we propose a...

We develop a positive non-parametric model of public sector production that allows us to test whether an implicit procedure of cost minimization at shadow prices can rationalize the outcomes of public sector activities. The basic model focuses on multiple C-outputs and does not imply any...