Legal empowerment has become widely accepted in development policy circles as an approach to addressing poverty and exclusion. At the same time, it has received relatively little attention from political scientists and sociologists working on overlapping and closely related topics. Research on...

Do rising inequality and youth unemployment aect preferences for redistribution? Using country-level European survey data from 2002 to 2015, I show that changes in market inequality and the rise of (youth) unemployment increase preferences for redistribution. The ndings are supported by the...

In a number of high-income countries over the past few decades there has been a large growth in income inequality and at the same time a shift in the burden of taxation from the top to the middle of the income distribution. This paper applies the theory of optimal piecewise linear taxation to...

We provide a parsimonious axiomatisation of the complete class of absolute nequality indices. Our approach uses only a weak form of decomposability and does not require a priori that the measures be differentiable

This paper discusses the theory and practice of tax design to achieve an efficient and equitable outcome, i.e. in support of inclusive growth. It starts with a discussion of the key principles from tax theory to guide practical tax design. Then, it elaborates on more granular tax policy,...

This paper reviews the key issues concerning the impact of public spending and taxation on long-run growth and inequality and takes stock of existing theoretical and empirical studies. Overall, the evidence highlights that the size of the government matters for long-term growth as a too large...

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...

Cooperation among people who are not related to each other is sustained by the availability of punishment devices which help enforce social norms (Fehr and Gc̃hter, 2002). However, the rationale for costly punishment remains unclear. This paper reports the results of an experiment investigating...

A free market economy is characterized by an unequal distribution of income, wealth, and opportunities, to the extent that a considerable part of the population does not enjoy the wellbeing which an affluent society can offer. Recent studies have shown that excessive inequality is bad not only...

Cooperation among people who are not related to each other is sustained by the availability of punishment devices which help enforce social norms (Fehr and Gächter, 2002). However, the rationale for costly punishment remains unclear. This paper reports the results of an experiment investigating...