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...

We characterize a measure of social welfare for linear production economies in which individuals differ in productive skills and preferences. The key feature of our measure is that it aggregates fairness gaps, defined as the difference between the money-metric utility that the individual...

This paper develops and defends a new approach to belief aggregation, involving confidence in beliefs. It is characterised by a variant of the Pareto condition that enjoins respecting consensuses borne of compromise. Confidence aggregation recoups standard probability aggregation rules, such as...

We study risk taking on behalf of others in an experiment on a large random sample. The decision makers in our experiment are facing high-powered incentives to increase the risk on behalf of others through hedged compensation contracts or with tournament incentives. Compared to a baseline...

We estimate responsibility-sensitive welfare weights for health that facilitate inequalityand inequity-sensitive policy evaluation. In a UK general population sample, 569 online experiment participants distribute constrained resources to determine the health of hypothetical individuals...

We augment the canonical neoclassical model of trade to allow for interstate disputes over land, oil, water, or other resources. The costs of such disputes in terms of arming depend on the trade regime in place. Under either autarky or free trade, the larger country (in terms of factor...

We examine a stark setting in which security or protection can be provided by self-governing groups or by for-profit entrepreneurs (kings, kleptocrats, or mafia dons). Though self-governance is best for the population, it faces problems of long-term viability. Typically, in providing security...

We start by arguing that to understand growth differences across countries and time, one needs to understand differences in public policies that affect the incentives for productive accumulation of capital, human capital, or technically useful knowledge. And to understand policy differences one...

In a model where cooperation is beneficial, but subject to cheating, and is supported by trigger strategy punishments in a repeated game, we explore the relationship between the nature of cooperation (size and composition of coalitions) and underlying inequality in the distribution of private...