This paper explores a new theoretical and empirical approach to the assessment of human well-being, relevant to current challenges of social fragmentation in the presence of globalization and technological advance. We present two indexes of well-being - solidarity (S) and agency (A) - to be...

Recent models of economic fairness assume that at least some people are motivated to reduce economic differences between themselves and other individuals. In addition to this motive, this paper investigates whether people care also about differences between third parties. An experiment is...

In this article, we show the evolution of inequality for the largest economies of the Latin American region in the 21st century, with separate consideration of income and wealth. We analyse the drivers of the changes in inequality and possible underlying causes, including the role of the new...

Thomas Piketty's widely-noted and bestselling book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, does much to advance our empirical understanding of rising high-end wealth concentration, which is one of the central issues of our time. But its theoretical approach and policy recommendations differ...

The object of research is information inequality. Information inequality is seen as a socio-economic problem that can be solved with the help of confident actions of the state. Data analysis confirmed the problem of the «digital divide» at the global and regional levels. The transformation of...

We estimate the distributional effects of freedom and income on happiness for East Asian Chinese societies through an ordinal parametric quantile regression approach. The results show that freedom and income exhibit positive and significant effects across societies and happiness levels. The...

Theoretical models of the Kuznets Curve have been purely analytical with little contribution towards an understanding of the timing of the process and the presence of additional mechanisms affecting its timing. This paper proposes an agent-based version of Acemoglu and Robinson's model of the...

This paper inverts the usual logic of applied optimal income taxation. It starts from the observed distribution of income before and after redistribution and corresponding marginal tax rates. Under a set of simplifying assumptions, it is then possible to recover the social welfare function that...

Drawing from the formal setting of the optimal tax theory (Mirrlees 1971), the paper identifies the level of Rawlsianism of some European social planners starting from the observation of real data and redistribution systems and uses it to build a metric that allows measuring the degree of...