The aim of this paper is to analyse individuals' feelings of justice concerning their wages conducting a survey of opinions. First of all, we wonder if these feelins are due to fairness norms or if they reflect a mere desire to maximize their incomes. If we can identify these norms, we wonder in...

The purpose of this note is to build an ethical inequality index which explicitely takes into account the social attitude towards inequlaity, through the actual tax scheme. We give a rough empirical application of this subjective inequality index to the evolution of wage inequality in France...

In a previous paper, Abouda and Chateauneuf proved that for RDEU maximizing MM with non-increasing marginal utility, positivity of the bid-ask spread can be identified with a very weak form of risk aversion SMRA. We perform here a more thorough study of SMRA, firstly in a general setting, and...

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...

When incomes are exogenously given, a progressive tax structure reduces inequality in the sense that the Lorenz curve of after tax incomes is nowhere below that of before tax incomes whatever the circumstances as it was shown by U. Jakobsson (Journal of Public Economics 5 (1976), 161-168) The...

We study the possibility of making social evaluations independently of individual preferences over non-consumed commodities. This is related to the well-known problem of performing international comparisons of standard of living across countries with different consumption goods. We prove...

This paper examines inequality in Australia using four Household Expenditure Surveys (HES) between 1975/76 and 1993/94, from the Australian Burau of Statistics (ABS). The effects on inequality of the choice of welfare variable, equivalence scale and price index are examined.

This paper develops the link between poverty and inequality by focussing on a class of poverty indices (some of them well-known) which aggregate normative concerns for absolute and relative deprivation. The indices are distinguished by a parameter that captures the ethical sensitivity of poverty...

We derive the asymptotic sampling distribution of various estimators frequently used to order distributions in terms of poverty, welfare and inequality. This includes estimators of most of the poverty indices currently in use, as well as estimators of the curves used to infer stochastic...