Consider an income distribution among households of the same size in which individuals, equally needy from the point of view of an ethical observer, are treated unfairly. Individuals are split into two types, the dominant and the dominated. We look for conditions under which welfare and...

When equivalence scales are used to compute the well-being of individuals, two possible weighting methods of the different household types have been proposed, the first one resorts to the family size and the second to the equivalence scale itself. The latter is criticized on the ground that it...

Properties of an average voting rule - the outcome being some weighted average of votes – are investigated, with particular attention to its ability to protect minorities. The unique average voting outcome is characterized with a median formula which depends on the voters’ preferred...

A student’s future log-wage is given by the sum of a skill premium and a random personal “ability” term. Students observe only a private, noisy signal of their ability, and universities can condition admission decisions on the results of noisy tests. We assume first that universities are...

To analyze equality of opportunity we examine the influence of family characteristics on the distribution of outcome for a given generation. Here, we study changes in equality of opportunity for income acquisition between 1977 and 1993, conditional on father's income level and income rank, using...

We investigate the conditions under which an inequality averse and additively separable welfarist constitution maker would always choose to set up a progressive equalization payment scheme in a federation with local public goods. A progressive equalization payment scheme is defined as a list of...

This paper provides a comparison of 12 OECD countries on the basis of the (multidimensional) inequality in both disposable income and access to public goods. The public goods considered, measured at the regional level, are infant mortality and pupils/teacher ratios at public schools. The...

When well-being is one-dimensional, the key ethical issue for the definition of social welfare is the degree of inequality aversion, which can be discussed with variants of the Pigou-Dalton transfer principle. When it is measured in terms of primary goods, functionings or capabilities,...

We investigate the problem of how to make welfare comparisons of income distributions hen a population allocation problem (how a population should be optimally divided over families for given resources) adds to the usual income allocation problem. Pro-family and anti-family stances are...

This paper examines how the tax burden in a developing economy should be distributed between capital income and labor income. We study a two-sector model, where the traditional sector is "informal" and consequently cannot be taxed by the government. In this set up, we find that the optimal...