This paper analyzes local public fiscal and spending behavior in a setting where local governments, represented by the dominant party or coalition, are treated as utility maximizing agents. The econometric analysis, which is based on a modified version of ELES, recognizes total spending as well...

This paper is concerned with the problem of ranking Lorenz curves in situations where the Lorenz curves intersect and no unambiguous ranking can be attained without introducing weaker ranking criteria than first-degree Lorenz dominance. To deal with such situations two alternative sequences of...

The percentage of poor among immigrants to Norway is much higher than the percentage among the native population so that immigrant status and ethnic origin may help to explain to some degree the continuing existence of poverty in Norway, an affluent country known for its relatively low income...

A substantial body of empirical evidence shows that individuals overweight extreme events and act in conflict with the expected utility theory. These findings were the primary motivation behind the development of the rank-dependent utility theory. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that...

Standard theory of intertemporal choice predicts that people smooth out life-cycle changes in income by borrowing and saving, such that their standard of living in any given year depends more on lifetime income than on that year’s income. Yet, contemporary empirical studies of income...

This paper is concerned with the problem of ranking and quantifying the extent of deprivation exhibited by multidimensional distributions, where the multiple attributes in which an individual can be deprived are represented by dichotomized variables. To this end we first aggregate deprivation...

In this paper, we introduce a new family of rank-dependent measures of inequality and social welfare consistent with the equality of opportunity (EOp) principle. The proposed framework can be used to measure long-term as well as short-term EOp, depending on whether we let permanent income or...

When is one distribution (of income, consumption, or some other economic variable) more equal or better than another? This question has proven difficult to answer in situations where distribution functions intersect and no unambiguous ranking can be attained without introducing weaker criteria...