It has been argued that collusion among the members of an organization or a vertical structure creates efficiency losses, and hence should be prevented. This paper shows that whenever collusion takes the form of co-insurance agreements, here called ?friendships?, among the members of a vertical...

This paper introduces two complementary models of firm-specific training: an informational model and a productivity-enhancement model. In both models, market provision of firm-specific training is inefficient. However, the nature of the inefficiency depends on the balance between the two key...

A new and powerful dictatorship result is presented. It is well known that in social choice problems, the negativism of the original Arrow result can be overcome by admitting information based on interpersonal comparisons. But what if individuals in society have different opinions about htese...

Starting from a simple, descriptive model of individual income, an explicit link between the age composition of a population and the personal distribution of incomes is established. Demographic effects on income inequality are derived. Next, a pay-as-you-go financed state pension system is...

We provide, for the class of relative bidimensional inequality indices, adecomposition of inequality into two univariate Atkinson-Kolm-Senindices and a third statistic which depends on the joint distribution ofresources.

This paper studies poverty as a dynamic phenomenon, motivated by the recurringeconomic crises that affect developing countries and the incidence of income fluctuationson household welfare. While the increasing availability of household panel data has beenexploited in theoretical analysis and...

mobility measures; robustness; data contamination

The economic analysis of income distribution and related topics makes extensive use of dominance criteria to draw inferences about welfare comparisons. However it is possible that - just as some inequality statistics can be very sensitive to extreme values - conclusions drawn from empirical...