We explore the implications of four natural axioms in taxation: continuity (small changes in the data of a taxation problem should not lead to large changes in the tax allocation), equal treatment of equals (agents with the same pre-tax incomes pay equal taxes), consistency (the way in which a...

In a model where individuals differ in both their health care needs and their lifestyle preferences, we study the fair provision of health care with fresh starts. Grounded on basic ethical principles, we axiomatically derive social preferences that allow us to make welfare assessments when...

This paper quantifies the effects of introducing a single open-ended contract for new hires, with increasing severance payments as an alternative to the current situation in Spain, where both temporary and permanent contracts are available. One of the reasons for the excessive job destruction in...

This paper proposes a mechanism to overcome the possibility that political parties may block the nomination of High-Court judges when the Parliament is involved in their nomination and their mandate expires on a fixed date. This possibility arises when the default option is that the judge whose...

Smoking is one of the main preventable causes of death in the world. There are several first-line pharmacological treatments available for smoking cessation. However, they are not very popular amongst smokers. There is evidence that smokers may not value these therapies in accordance with the...

We consider a market where firms hire workers to run their projects and such projects differ in profitability. At any period, each firm needs two workers to successfully run its project: a junior agent, with no specific skills, and a senior worker, whose effort is not verifiable. Senior workers...

Resource egalitarianism and welfare egalitarianism are two focal conceptions of distributive justice. We show in this paper that they share a solid common ground. To do so, we analyze a simple model of resource allocation in which agents’ abilities (to transform the resource into an...

We study how a behavior (an idea, buying a product, having a disease, adopting a cultural fad or a technology) spreads among agents in an a social network that exhibits segregation or homophily (the tendency of agents to associate with others similar to themselves). Individuals are distinguished...

The Lead Time Trade-Off (L-TTO) is a variant of the TTO method that tries to overcome some of the problems of the most widely used method (Torrance, 1986) for health states worse than death (SWD). Theoretically, the new method reduces the problems that have been detected when researchers have...

There have been changes in the way that NICE evaluates medical treatments for patients who are in the last stages of their lives. If medicines fulfil some criteria to be considered “end of life” NICE considers if QALYs gained under these circumstances should receive an extra weight. In this...