Research background: Applied welfare economics offers various social welfare functions (SWF) for appraising income distributions. Social planners commonly use two SWFs: SWFε implied by income inequality aversion (ε) and SWFv implied by rank inequality aversion (v). However, a voluntary choice...

In this paper, the method of deriving the parameter ε of inequality aversion from a parametric distribution of incomes is proposed. It is assumed that a social decision-maker appraises welfare in income distributions by means of the constant inequality aversion utility function and that incomes...

Aggregate exports are not very responsive to real exchange rates, though they respond strongly to trade liberalizations, a fact sometimes referred to as the International Elasticity Puzzle. We use micro data on firms and exports for Ireland to dissect the puzzle. Our identification strategy uses...