Under a deadweight loss of tax and transfer, there is tension between the optimal policy choices of a Rawlsian social planner and a utilitarian social planner. However, when with a weight greater than a certain critical value the individuals' utility functions incorporate distaste for low...

In determining the optimal redistribution of a given population's income, we ask which factor is more important: the social planner's aversion to inequality, embedded in an isoelastic social welfare function indexed by a parameter alpha, or the individuals' concern at having a low relative...

When individuals' utility is a convex combination of their income and their concern at having a low relative income (the weights attached to income and to the concern at having a low relative income sum up to one), the maximization of aggregate utility yields an equal income distribution. This...

Social comparisons are important in the employment sphere. A "culture of unemployment" may evolve and prevail because it is optimal for an individual to remain unemployed when other unemployed individuals constitute his main reference group. We advance the idea that by making the receipt of...

Let there be two individuals: "rich," and "poor." Due to inefficiency of the income redistribution policy, if a social planner were to tax the rich in order to transfer to the poor, only a fraction of the taxed income would be given to the poor. Under such inefficiency and a standard utility...

We present a theory that systematically and causally links the well-being of native inhabitants with variation in the extent of the assimilation of migrants. Recent empirical findings are yielded as predictions of the theory.

Assuming that an individual’s rank in the wealth distribution is the only factor determining the individual’s wellbeing, we analyze the individual’s risk preferences in relation to gaining or losing rank, rather than the individual’s risk preferences towards gaining or losing absolute...

We study the assimilation behavior of a group of migrants who live in a city populated by native inhabitants. We conceptualize the group as a community, and the city as a social space. Assimilation increases the productivity of migrants and, consequently, their earnings. However, assimilation...

We consider a tax-funded policy of admitting and integrating asylum seekers in a country in which the incomes of the native inhabitants are differentiated; for the sake of simplicity, we assume that there are just two groups of native inhabitants: high-income natives and low-income natives. As a...

We introduce a new class of generalized measures of relative deprivation. The class takes the form of a power mean of order p . A characteristic of the class is that depending on the value of the proximity-sensitive parameter p , the class is capable of accommodating both a decreasing weight...