This paper argues that the link between poverty and drug-related crime might be spurious. We take an empirical approach to investigate the causality and plausibility of this link. Firstly, we regress crime against envisaged explanatory variables in order to estimate the contribution of poverty...

Agents involved in a conflicting claims problem may be concerned with the proportion of their claims that is satisfied, or with the total amount they get. In order to relate both perspectives, we associate to each conflicting claims problem a bargaining-in-proportions set. Then, we obtain a...

Mediation is a dispute resolution process whereby agents reach a mutually acceptable agreement among different proposals that satisfy a set of principles. This paper provides a natural way of coming to such agreements in claims problems. In our approach, mediation combines (i) a set of fair...

In a moneyless market, a non storable, non transferable homogeneous commodity is reallocated between agents with single-peaked preferences. Agents are either suppliers or demanders. Transfers between a supplier and a demander are feasible only if they are linked, and the links form an arbitrary...

We prove a general possibility result for collective decision problems where individual allocations are one-dimensional, preferences are single-peaked (strictly convex), and feasible allocation profiles cover a closed convex set. Special cases include the celebrated median voter theorem (Black...

This paper studies the problem of burden sharing in countries that were forced to introduce severe budget cuts after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 which had unleashed a financial crisis in many industrialised countries of the Western world. We do not ask how the burden was actually...

In a model where individuals differ in both their health care needs and their lifestyle preferences, we examine the fair provision of health care when those who regret their initial decisions are granted a fresh start. By considering that each agent chooses how to allocate a given amount of...

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...

We provide an axiomatic justification to aggregate money metrics. The key axiom requires the approval of richer-to-poorer transfers that preserve the overall efficiency of the distribution. This transfer principle - together with the basic axioms of anonymity, continuity, monotonicity, and a...