An influential subset of the literature on distributional preferences studies how preferences condition on information about workers’ characteristics, such as their relative productivity. In this study we confirm that there are default effects when such conditional fair-ness preferences are...

Over the past few decades, economies and technologies have shifted in ways that have made people’s economic prospects more uncertain. This Policy Insights highlights the main findings from On Shaky Ground? Income Instability and Economic Insecurity in Europe, the inaugural report of the OECD...

Wage mobility reduces the persistence of wage inequality. We develop a framework to quantify the contribution of employer-to-employer movers to aggregate wage mobility. Using three decades of German social security data, we find that inequality increased while aggregate wage mobility decreased....

There is no consensus on how to measure social welfare and inequality when households have different needs. As we show, a dilemma emerges between holding households responsible for their needs or compensating them. This dilemma is of first-order importance for social welfare, but generally plays...

We analyze the effect of CEO pay disclosure on wage distribution by exploiting a 1998 reform requiring Italian publicly listed companies to disclose top executives' compensation. In firms where CEOs disclose high total compensation, the top 5 percent and 1 percent of the within-firm wage...

Sustainability has been largely replaced by discounted utilitarianism in contemporary climate-change economics. Our approach rejuvenates sustainability by expanding the conception of the quality of life, along the lines of the UN Human Development Reports, to include not only consumption, but...

This article discusses the case of the minimimum wage for Italy as a policy instrument to foster both social justice and productive efficiency. After briefly reviewing the empirical evidence on the effects of minimum wages upon employment, wage distribution and firm-level reallocation, it...

Wage mobility reduces the persistence of wage inequality. We develop a framework to quantify the contribution of employer-to-employer movers to aggregate wage mobility. Using three decades of German social security data, we find that inequality increased while aggregate wage mobility decreased....

Formal conceptions of state capacity have mostly focused on indirect measures of state capacity - by, for instance, using the state's fiscal or extractive capacity as a proxy for its overall capacity. Yet, this input or extractive view of state capacity falls short, especially since...

Should climate policy rely on a price of Carbon that is uniform across sectors? This paper studies this question from a public finance perspective. It is found that a justification for a uniform price can be given, but it relies on strong assumptions, among them indifference with respect to the...