We study fair and efficient tax-benefit schemes based on income and non-income factors under partial control. Partial control means that each factor is a specific mixture of unobserved ability (randomly drawn by nature) and effort (chosen by individuals who differ in tastes). Factors differ in...

We provide an axiomatic justification to aggregate money metrics. The key axiom requires the approval of richer-to-poorer transfers that preserve the overall efficiency of the distribution. This transfer principle - together with the basic axioms of anonymity, continuity, monotonicity, and a...

There is clear evidence that fairness plays a role in redistribution. Individuals want to compensate others for their misfortune, while they allow them to enjoy the fruits of their effort. This paper introduces fairness in a tax-benefit scheme that is based on several characteristics in order to...

There is clear evidence that fairness plays a role in redistribution. Individuals want to compensate others for their misfortune, while they allow them to enjoy the fruits of their effort. Such fairness considerations have been introduced in political economy and optimal income tax models with a...

Fiscal externalities arise if subsidies to higher education raise future net fiscal revenues. We investigate in which countries fiscal externalities provide a justification for increasing subsidies to higher education. First, we show that the marginal fiscal recovery rate, i.e. the ratio of the...

We characterize a measure of social welfare for linear production economies in which individuals differ in productive skills and preferences. The key feature of our measure is that it aggregates fairness gaps, defined as the difference between the money-metric utility that the individual...

School accountability schemes require measures of school performance, and these measures are in practice often based on pupil test scores. It is well-known that insufficiently correcting these test scores for pupil characteristics may provide incentives for inefficient pupil selection. We show...

Many countries provide extra resources to schools serving disadvantaged pupils. We exploit a discontinuity in the assignment of such personnel subsidies in Flanders to estimate the impact on cognitive outcomes via a regression discontinuity (RD) design. Because bias can be substantial in RD...

In his thought-provoking book What Money Can't Buy. The Moral Limits of Markets, Sandel (2012) claims that some nonmarket ways of allocating goods, such as the ethics of the queue (first come, first served), are gradually being displaced by the ethics of the market. He highlights inequality as...

I first summarize and critically discuss the different normative views that are operational in the academic literature on education. Afterwards, I analyze how prioritarians would allocate resources in a dynamic model of skill formation and compare it to utilitarians and Rawlsians. I finish with...