Climate stabilization requires low GHG emissions. Is this consistent with nondecreasing human welfare? Our welfare index, called quality of life (QuoL), emphasizes education, knowledge, and the environment. We calibrate a multigenerational model with education, physical capital, knowledge and...

This project employs the theory of opportunity, described in Roemer''s book (Equality of Opportunity, Harvard University Press, 1998), to compute the extent to which tax-and-transfer regimes in ten countries equalize opportunities among citizens for income acquisition. Roughly speaking, equality...

Sustainability has been largely replaced by discounted utilitarianism in contemporary climate-change economics. Our approach rejuvenates sustainability by expanding the conception of the quality of life, along the lines of the UN Human Development Reports, to include not only consumption, but...

Many studies have estimated the effect of circumstances on income acquisition. Perhaps surprisingly, the fraction of inequality attributable to circumstances is usually quite small - in the advanced democracies, on the order of 20%. One reason for this is the lack of data on circumstance...