Inequity plays a fundamental role in the evaluation of social welfare in many dimensions.We revisit the concept of inequity, whether across states of world (uncertainty), across individuals (inequality) and across generations (intergenerational equity), using a common framework generalizing the...

The techniques of simple random sampling are seldom appropriate in the empirical analysis of income distributions. Various types of weighting schemes are usually required either from the point of view of welfare-economic considerations (the mapping of household/family distributions into...

Over the last decades, research in behavioural economics has demonstrated that individual welfare (utility), as relevant for economic decision making, depends not only on absolut but also on distributional aspects. Moreover, evidence is gathering that something similar holds for aggregate...

Some middle-income economies, many of which Latin American, have not achieved to make the transition into high-income status for long years and are allegedly trapped in middle-income status. While there is considerable consensus on the proximate causes of this phenomenon, we present a global...

A transfer from a richer individual to a poorer one seems to be the most intuitive and straightforward way of reducing income inequality in a society. However, can such a transfer reduce the welfare of the society? We show that a rich-to-poor transfer can induce a response in the individuals'...

In determining the optimal redistribution of a given population's income, we ask which factor is more important: the social planner's aversion to inequality, embedded in an isoelastic social welfare function indexed by a parameter alpha, or the individuals' concern at having a low relative...

In determining the optimal redistribution of a given population's income, we ask which factor is more important: the social planner's aversion to inequality, embedded in an isoelastic social welfare function indexed by a parameter alpha, or the individuals' concern at having a low relative...

This paper analyzes growth and welfare effects of income taxation in a stochastic endogenous growth model with externalities in human-capital accumulation. The government participates in individual income risks by the collection of a flat-rate income tax that affects the mean and the variance of...

This paper develops a fully-endogenous, variety-expansion growth model with firm-specific quality heterogeneity, limit pricing, and an endogenous distribution of markups. Trade induces only firms with high-quality products to export, whereas firms with low-quality products serve only the...

This paper discusses the underpinnings of the financial crisis of the last decade in post-transition countries. It explores the endogenous reasons of this crisis, and in particular a possible link between delayed and unequal growth of household incomes on the one hand and the instability of the...