We propose a social welfare function to evaluate a profile of income streams and compare the welfare gain of the actual profile relative to the income profile where the individual receives his first period income in each period. We derive necessary and sufficient conditions for the welfare gain...

Much has been written about the relationship between economic growth and aggregate inequality in recent years. In this paper we extend this literature by examining whether economic growth affects, not the level, but rather the nature of inequality. To do this we focus on the Irish economy which...

The aim of this paper is to propose an axiomatic characterization of an aggregate measure of growth that takes into account the initial economic conditions of individuals, through their position in the initial income distribution. The contribution of our work to the existing literature is...