This paper provides an analysis of the social consequences of people seeking to keep up with the Joneses. All individuals attempt to reach a higher rank than the Joneses, including the Joneses themselves. This attitude gives rise to an equilibrium in which all individuals have equal utilities...

We investigate the redistributive and welfare effects of disinflation in a two-agent New Keynesian (TANK) model characterized by Limited Asset Market Participation (LAMP) and wealth inequality. We highlight two key mechanisms driving our long-run results: i) the cash in advance constraint on...

Government redistribution is increasingly important in today's world. The effect of income distribution on industrialization and growth, and the causes of income redistribution have been studied in the contemporary literature. The normative significance of income redistribution, however, which...

This paper verifies the relationship between income inequality and pecuniary crimes. The elasticity of pecuniary crimes relative to inequality is 1.46, corroborating previous literature. Other factors important to decrease criminality are expanding job opportunities and a more efficient legal system

This paper reviews some of the central issues that arise in thinking about the motives for, politics of, constraints on and measurement of, redistribution. Amongst the themes are: the potential usefulness of apparently inefficient policy instruments in overcoming the self-selection constraints...

In the presence of (at least locally) increasing returns to scale tech- nologies, the paper asks the question: does there exist an economic system which implements Pareto efficient allocations and respects the voluntary participation principle? To answer this question, the paper formulates an...

I analyze the welfare effects of a policy of modern sector enlargement (MSENL), and a policy of increasing the efficiency of on-the-job search from the urban informal sector (IEOS) in a generalized Harris-Todaro model. I show that MSENL causes a Lorenz worsening of the income distribution and...

This paper provides an analysis of the social consequences of people seeking to keep up with the Joneses. All individuals attempt to reach a higher rank than the Joneses, including the Joneses themselves. This attitude gives rise to an equilibrium in which all individuals have equal utilities...

One set of n objects of type I, another set of n objects of type II, and an amount M of money is to be completely allocated among n agents in such a way that each agent gets one object of each type with some amount of money. We propose a new solution concept to this problem called a perfectly...

Conventional deadweight loss measures of the social cost of monopoly ignore, among other things, the social cost of inducing competition and thus cannot accurately capture the loss in social welfare. In this Article, we suggest an alternative method of measuring the social cost of monopoly....