This is a background note to a joint IPEA/World Bank Report, provisionally entitled "Selected Topics on Income Inequality in Brazil", with publication planned for 2001. The purpose of the note is twofold. First we propose four central questions which the Report should seek to address, and around...

This paper analyzes the impact of rewards on tax compliance as an additional instrument to take into account. While social psychologists and neuroscientists have emphasized the importance of rewards, the tax compliance literature has strongly disregarded the possibilities of rewards. The use of...

What are the responsibility of oil companies in resource rich countries? Do they take these responsibilities? Based on a utilitarian perspective and theories of the resource curse, we discuss the oil companies' corporate social responsibility (CSR) when a resource rich country such as Angola...

The original Homo Economicus has progressed from an atomistic and self-interested individual to a socially embedded agent in modern economics. In particular, social interaction models suggest that the individual’s own utility of undertaking an action may be influenced by the number of peers...

This paper takes sustainability to be a matter of intergenerational welfare equality and examines whether an optimal development path can also be sustainable. It argues that the general “zero-net-aggregate-investment” condition for an optimal development path to be sustainable in the sense...

The key role of technological change in the decline of energy and carbon intensities of aggregate economic activities is widely recognized. This has focused attention on the issue of developing endogenous models for the evolution of technological change. With a few exceptions this is done using...

Inequity aversion is a special form of other regarding preferences and captures many features of reciprocal behavior, an apparently robust pattern in human nature. Using this concept we analyze the Moral Hazard problem and derive several results which differ from conventional contract theory....

This paper argues that while a long-term solution to climate change may require the global market-based solution envisioned in the Kyoto Protocol, a more flexible near-term approach is necessary. First, a broad range of domestic policies need to be embraced and encouraged by an international...

This paper develops an ordinal method of comparison of multidimensional inequality. In our model, population distribution g is more unequal than f when the distributions have common median and can be obtained from f by one or more shifts in population density that increase inequality. For our...