The paper investigates the effect of local economic conditions on crime. The study focuses on Italy's local labor markets and analyzes the short-term response of crime to the severe slump of 2007-2009. It shows that the downturn led to a significant increase in economic-related offenses that do...

Combined with the expansion of economic literature on the role of ethnicity, new indices were developed to do justice to its complexity. The current indices are generally based on pre-defined groups, disregarding the (dis)similarities between them. This is sufficient to calculate the most common...

This paper provides an axiomatic characterization of two rules for comparing alternative sets of objects on the basis of the diversity that they offer. The framework considered assumes a finite universe of objects and an a priori given ordinal quadernary relation that compares alternative pairs...

This paper derives a basic formula for the measure of social welfare, a second order approximation to the difference of the value of the Bergson-Samuelson social welfare function between the socially optimal resource allocation and the one in the present suboptimal economy. We discuss pros and...

Combined with the expansion of economic literature on the role of ethnicity, new indices were developed to do justice to its complexity. The current indices are generally based on pre-defined groups, disregarding the (dis)similarities between them. This is sufficient to calculate the most common...

We propose a set of axioms for the measurement of school-based segregation withany number of ethnic groups. These axioms are motivated by two criteria. The first isevenness: how much do ethnic groups’ distributions across schools differ? The secondis representativeness: how different are...

Empirical evidence on distributional preferences shows that people do not judge inequality as problematic per se but that they take the underlying sources of income differences into account. In contrast to this evidence, current measures of inequality do not adequately reflect these normative...

Equality of opportunity is a principle of justice that is built on two fundamental ideas. On the one hand, outcome differences across individuals are unacceptable if they are rooted in factors that are beyond individual control. Examples of such circumstance characteristics are the biological...

This paper presents a new family of chronic poverty measures based on the Pa poverty measures of Foster, Greer,and Thorbecke (1984). The chronically poor are identified using two cutoffs: a standard poverty line, which identifies the time periods during which a person is poor; and a duration...

This paper provides an axiomatic characterization of two rules for comparing alternative sets of objects on the basis of the diversity that they offer. The framework considered assumes a finite universe of objects and an a priori given ordinal quadernary relation that compares alternative pairs...