This chapter reviews the theory of the voluntary public and private redistribution of wealth elaborated by economic analysis in the last forty years or so. The central object of the theory is altruistic gift-giving, construed as benevolent voluntary redistribution of income or wealth. The theory...

The authors set up a political economy equilibrium framework for personal income distribution. Located in status theory, their concept is able to explain what justifies a certain or optimal degree of inequality in the society. The authors present an empirical analysis of personal income...

Reductions in the generosity of welfare benefits and less progressive taxation have decreased the redistributive impact of fiscal policy since the mid-1990’s across the advanced democracies. We argue that the strong increase in the diversity of goods observed those last decades may have...

I propose a framework in which individual political participation can take two distinct forms, voting and contributing resources to campaigns, in a context in which the negligible impact of any individual's actions on aggregate outcomes is fully recognized by all agents. I then use the framework...

We examine experimentally individual preferences for redistributions in the US, Italy, and Norway. Twenty-one subjects were assigned initial earnings from a discrete uniform distribution. The source of earnings was manipulated and depended either on luck or on individual relative performance in...

It is not straightforward to define the ethics of responsibility in cases where the consequences of changes in factors within our control are partly determined by factors beyond our control. In this paper, we suggest that one plausible view is to keep us responsible for the parts of the...

As a proxy for a Pareto-efficient market economy, we adopt the two-party Nash Bargaining model featuring a qualitative bias in the treatment of the contributions of the parties. The Piketty inequality here is the share in total welfare accruing to the richer party over total welfare attained at...

Using a sample of 20 OECD countries it is shown that the majority of countries decreased the level of intragenerational redistribution in the first pillar of their pension systems, though the evidence is weak in statistical terms. We find strong correlations between changes of the so-called...

It is not straightforward to define the ethics of responsibility in cases where the consequences of changes in factors within our control are partly determined by factors beyond our control. In this paper, we suggest that one plausible view is to keep us responsible for the parts of the...

We examine experimentally individual preferences for redistributions in the US, Italy, and Norway. Twenty-one subjects were assigned initial earnings from a discrete uniform distribution. The source of earnings was manipulated and depended either on luck or on individual relative performance in...