¿Cómo puede definirse la justicia en la educación? Hacerlo de una manera rigurosa requiere la elaboración de algunas alternativas metodológicas importantes. Este artículo, se concentra en la más básica de ellas: los logros educativos esenciales (currency of educational justice). Dado que...

At first blush, Thaler and Sunstein seem to be proposing that voluntarily helping people to overcome or cope with their rash, ignorant, impulsive selves be called “libertarian paternalism.†Such semantics would only cause confusion and introduce new terminology for things already well...

We examine Robert Frank’s arguments for taxation to mitigate positional externalities. The scarcity that characterizes positional goods is real, but various mechanisms reduce the potential waste, and Frank overstates the case for a governmental solution. The plausibility of Frank’s...

The purpose of this paper is to introduce and adopt a generalised version of Roemer's (1998) Equality of Opportunity (EOp) framework, which we call extended EOp, for analysing second-best optimal income taxation. Unlike the pure EOp criterion of Roemer (1998) the extended EOp criterion allows...

Taking as starting point the warnings by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress (2009) on the influence that what we measure exerts on policy design, the paper focuses on the support, deemed arbitrary, that fiscal residua have given and still give to the...

We develop a directional measure of income mobility. This measure can be expresssed as a rank dependent mean of the individual mobilities in society and allows to give more weight to lower individual mobilities. The class includes the measures of directional mobility encountered in the...

Although one may hope to achieve equality of stated profits without enforcing it, one may not trust in such voluntary equality seeking and rather try to impose rules (of bidding) guaranteeing it. Our axiomatic approach is based on envy-free net trades according to bids which, together with the...

In most developing countries, income inequality tends to worsen during initial stages of growth, especially in urban areas. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) provides a sharp contrast where income inequality among urban households is lower than that among rural households. In terms of...

Let there be a positive (exogenous) probability that, at each date, the human species will disappear. We postulate an Ethical Observer (EO) who maximizes intertemporal welfare under this uncertainty, with expected-utility preferences. Various social welfare criteria entail alternative von...

We study a dynamic game in which all players initially possess the same information and coordinate on a high level of activity. Eventually, players with a long string of bad experiences become inactive. This prospect can cause a coordination avalanche in which all activity in the population...