Leaky-bucket transactions can be regarded as income transfers allowing for transaction costs. In its most rudimentary form, leaky-bucket transactions trace out the maximum leakageʺ of transaction costs before income inequality is exacerbated, or before a welfare loss is experienced. This notion...

We examine the socially optimal wealth distribution in a two-person two-good model with heterogeneous workers and asymmetric social interactions where only one (social) individual derives positive or negative utility from the leisure of the other (non-social) individual. We show that the...

Meritocracies aspire to reward hard work and promise not to judge individuals by the circumstances into which they were born. However, circumstances often shape the choice to work hard. I show that people's merit judgments are "shallow" and insensitive to this effect. They hold others...

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...

What do we mean by inequality comparisons? If the rich just get richer and the poor get poorer, the answer might seem easy. But what if the income distribution changes in a complicated way? Can we use mathematical or statistical techniques to simplify the comparison problem in a way that has...

This paper studies the constructive nature of social welfare orders on infinite utility streams defined on X= Y^N, satisfying the Pigou-Dalton transfer principle (PD), which are known to be representable (see Alcantud (2010) and Sakamoto (2012)).We describe the restrictions on domain Y for...