Although it is not a new phenomenon, in recent years inequality has moved to the top of the political agenda given the concern that will result in political instability and social resentment. Persistence in inequality can further undermine economic growth and development by hindering educational...

We present a flexible structural equation modeling (SEM) framework for the regression-based decomposition of rank-dependent indicators of socioeconomic inequality of health and compare it with simple ordinary least squares (OLS) regression. The SEM framework forms the basis for a proper use of...

A real-effort experiment is conducted in order to detect preferences for one out of three different models of the Welfare State characterized by different tax-and-transfer schemes. We reproduce a small society in the lab where: Subjects are grouped in three stylized classes (the rich, the middle...

This paper formally examines two competing methods of conducting a lottery in assigning students to schools, motivated by the design of the centralized high school student assignment system in New York City. The main result of the paper is that a single and multiple lottery mechanism are...

Distributional constraints are important in many market design settings. Prominent examples include the minimum manning requirements at each Army branch in military cadet matching and diversity considerations in school choice, whereby school districts impose constraints on the demographic...

The case for progressive income taxation is often based on the classic result of Jakobsson, 1976 and Fellman, 1976, according to which progressive and only progressive income taxes - in the sense of increasing average tax rates on income - ensure a reduction in income inequality. This result has...

Distributional constraints are common features in many real matching markets, such as medical residency matching, school admissions, and teacher assignment. We develop a general theory of matching mechanisms under distributional constraints. We identify the necessary and sufficient condition on...