Millions of tenants in the United States reside in substandard housing conditions ranging from toxic mold to the absence of heat, running water, or electricity. These conditions constitute blatant violations of law. The failure to maintain housing in habitable condition can violate the warranty...

We used unconditional quantile regression to reveal heterogeneity in the social gradient at different levels of Body Mass Index (BMI) distribution by educational level, employment situation and neighborhood income for 1986 and 2016 in Barcelona. The contribution of these factors to changes in...

We examine an assumed link between reducing inequality in income distribution, namely reducing the Gini coefficient on one hand, and improving public health in general and lowering the incidence and severity of COVID-19 in particular on the other hand. The Gini coefficient can be shown to...

We examine an assumed link between reducing inequality in income distribution, namely reducing the Gini coefficient on one hand, and improving public health in general and lowering the incidence and severity of COVID-19 in particular on the other hand. The Gini coefficient can be shown to...

Millions Saved (2016) is a new edition of detailed case studies on the attributable impact of global health programs at scale. As an input to the book, this paper provides an independent assessment of the cost-effectiveness of a selection of the cases using ex post information from impact...

Recentered influence functions (RIFs) are statistical tools popularized by Firpo, Fortin, and Lemieux (2009) for analyzing unconditional partial effects on quantiles in a regression analysis framework (unconditional quantile regressions). The flexibility and simplicity of these tools has opened...

There is clear evidence that fairness plays a role in redistribution. Individuals want to compensate others for their misfortune, while they allow them to enjoy the fruits of their effort. This paper introduces fairness in a tax-benefit scheme that is based on several characteristics in order to...

Some claim that `incommensurability` poses serious problems for the standard account of rationality and for the case for markets in economics. Incommensurability may indeed involve violations of basic axioms, such as completeness, transitivity and continuity. Sen`s version of the maximization...

In the distributive analysis, the constant relative inequality aversion utility function is a standard tool for ethical judgements of income distributions. The sole parameter ε of this function expresses a society’s aversion to inequality. However, the profession has not committed to the...

The use of equivalence scales for the measurement of inequality and social welfare poses a difficult ethical and technical dilemma. If all individuals are weighted equally while individual welfare measures are based on income or consumption per equivalent adult, then standard properties assumed...