In the last thirty years, economists and other social scientists have investigated people's normative views on distributive justice. Here we study people's normative views in social dilemmas, which underlie many situations of economic and social significance. Using insights from moral philosophy...

This paper analyses Rawls's celebrated difference principle, and its lexicographic extension, in societies with a finite and an infinite number of agents. A unified framework of analysis is set up, which allows one to characterise Rawlsian egalitarian principles by means of a weaker version of a...

We demonstrate the existence of an intergenerational equity-efficiency tradeoff in policy-making that aims at Pareto-efficiency across generations and sustainability, i.e. non-decreasing utility over time. Our model includes two salient characteristics of sustainability problems and policy: (i)...

The complementarity between wage setting and welfare spending can explain how almost equally rich countries differ in economic and social equality among their citizens. More wage equality increases the welfare generosity via political competition in elections. A more generous welfare state fuels...

Die „Hartz-Reformen“ werden in der öffentlichen Meinung oft als ungerecht kritisiert. Das hat die Frage aufgeworfen, inwieweit rationale Wirtschaftspolitik auch gerecht sein kann. Wie definiert sich in der Ökonomik überhaupt das Verhältnis von Sachgerechtigkeit und gesellschaftlicher...

This paper argues that the reduction of horizontal inequalities (HIs) or inequalities between culturally defined groups should inform aid policy in heterogeneous countries with severe HIs. It shows how this would change aid allocation across countries, leading to more aid to heterogeneous...

Many countries are implementing or at least considering policies to counter increasingly certain negative impacts from climate change. An increasing amount of research has been devoted to the analysis of the costs of climate change and its mitigation, as well as to the design of policies, such...

We argue that economics - as the scientific method of analyzing trade-offs - can be helpful (and may even be indispensable) for assessing the trade-off between intergenerational and intragenerational justice. Economic analysis can delineate the opportunity set of politics with respect to the two...

It has often been claimed that it is impossible to measure human capabilities but within the methodological conventions of household survey design, we show that some non-financial capability indicators do already exist and we demonstrate how similar indicators, covering a wide range of life...