This article is largely a survey of ideas and findings about economic inequality. It begins with an account of the socialist demand for economic equality and shows that this is incompatibloe with the rival social value of liberty. Utilitarismn which has dominated economic work on the problem, is...

A class of inequality measures that is a natural companion to the popular Lorenz curve is the class of measures that are linear in incomes. These measures, which include the Gini and S-Gini coefficients, can be interpreted as ethical means of relative deprivation feelings. Their change through...

The Serial Cost Sharing Rule has been conceived originally for problems where agents ask for different quantities of an homogeneous private good, the sum of which is produced by a single facility. In this context, it is endowed with a variety of desirable equity and coherency properties. This...

This Paper shows that identical offers in an ultimatum game generate systematically different rejection rates depending on the other offers that are available to the proposer. This result casts doubt on the consequentialist practice in economics of defining the utility of an action solely in...

This paper uses the sequencing of privatisation to infer the objective pursued by the Polish government in the privatisation of its large manufacturing firms in the second half of the 1990's. We construct a model of mixed oligopoly, and use it to evaluate the privatisation process; our analysis...

This Paper constructs and analyses a long run time series for regional inequality in China from the Communist Revolution to the present. There have been three peaks of inequality in the last fifty years, coinciding with the Great Famine of the late 1950s, the Cultural Revolution of the late...

¿Cómo puede definirse la justicia en la educación? Hacerlo de una manera rigurosa requiere la elaboración de algunas alternativas metodológicas importantes. Este artículo, se concentra en la más básica de ellas: los logros educativos esenciales (currency of educational justice). Dado que...

We examine Robert Frank’s arguments for taxation to mitigate positional externalities. The scarcity that characterizes positional goods is real, but various mechanisms reduce the potential waste, and Frank overstates the case for a governmental solution. The plausibility of Frank’s...

The purpose of this paper is to introduce and adopt a generalised version of Roemer's (1998) Equality of Opportunity (EOp) framework, which we call extended EOp, for analysing second-best optimal income taxation. Unlike the pure EOp criterion of Roemer (1998) the extended EOp criterion allows...

Taking as starting point the warnings by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress (2009) on the influence that what we measure exerts on policy design, the paper focuses on the support, deemed arbitrary, that fiscal residua have given and still give to the...