This paper proposes a new way to evaluate tax reforms, by aggregating losses and gains of different individuals using "generalized social marginal welfare weights." A tax system is optimal if no budget neutral small reform can increase the weighted sum of (money metric) gains and losses across...

We estimate responsibility-sensitive welfare weights for health that facilitate inequalityand inequity-sensitive policy evaluation. In a UK general population sample, 569 online experiment participants distribute constrained resources to determine the health of hypothetical individuals...

In many important economic settings, limited information makes it impossible for decision makers to ensure that each individual gets what he or she deserves. Decision makers are then faced with the trade-off between giving some individuals more than they deserve, false positives, and giving some...

Meritocracies aspire to reward hard work and promise not to judge individuals by the circumstances into which they were born. However, circumstances often shape the choice to work hard. I show that people's merit judgments are "shallow" and insensitive to this effect. They hold others...

This paper examines the choice between government expenditure on public goods and transfer payments, in the form of a pension, in an overlapping-generations model. Government expenditure is tax-financed on a pay-as-you-go basis. A utilitarian judge chooses expenditures to maximize a social...

Zu große Einkommensungleichheit gefährdet die Prosperität und Kohärenz einer Gesellschaft im gleichen Maß wie ein zu hoher Ausgleich der Einkommen; mittlere Ausgleichniveaus hingegen weisen die höchste Konsensfähigkeit auf. Diese Erkenntnisse resultieren aus der analytischen Nutzung von...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the possibility of a social choice rule to implement a social policy for ìsecuring basic well-being for all.î The paper introduces a new scheme of social choice, called a social relation function (SRF), which associates a reáexive and transitive binary...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the possibility of a social choice rule to implement a social policy for “securing basic well-being for all.” For this purpose, the paper introduces a new scheme of social choice, called a social relation function (SRF), which associates to each...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the possibility of a social choice rule to implement a social policy for “securing basic well-being for all.” For this purpose, the paper introduces a new scheme of social choice, called a social relation function (SRF), which associates to each...