The comparative advantage has been studied from various perspectives, focusing solely on partial efforts such as labor force. Some researchers, such as Manoilescu, have attempted to establish a more rigorous theoretical model by observing total efforts. Moreover, the above-mentioned researcher...

This paper shows conditions under which a marginally progressive income tax emerges as the outcome of political competition between two parties, when labor is elastically supplied and candidates are uncertain about voters' choice at election day. Assuming the elasticity of labor is decreasing on...

In Fairness versus Welfare, we advance the thesis that social policies should be assessed based entirely on their effects on individuals' well-being. This thesis implies that no independent weight should be accorded to notions of fairness (other than many purely distributive notions). We support...

Interest in economic mobility stems largely from its perceived role as an equalizer of opportunities, though not necessarily of outcomes. In this paper we show that this view leads very naturally to a methodology for the measurement of social mobility which has strong parallels with the theory...

The public at large, many policymakers, and some economists hold views of social welfare that attach some importance to factors other than individuals' utilities. This note shows that any such non-individualistic notion of social welfare conflicts with the Pareto principle.

Between 1660 and 1830, Parliament passed thousands of acts restructuring rights to real and equitable estates. These estate acts enabled individuals and families to sell, mortgage, lease, exchange, and improve land previously bound by inheritance rules and other legal legacies. The loosening of...

We establish the precise connections between progressive taxation and inequality reduction, in a setting where the level of tax revenue to be raised is exogenously fixed and tax schemes are balanced. We show that, in contrast with the traditional literature on taxation, the equivalence between...

This paper reassesses national income inequalities in this era of globalization. The main conclusion is that two opposite forces are at work: one ‘centrifugal’ at the two extremes of the distribution—increasing the disparity of income shares appropriated by the top and by the bottom four...

In this paper I will analyse the redistribution of income amongst n generations using the Single-mindedness Theory. I will introduce a new expression for the balanced-budget constraint, no longer based on lump- sum transfers as in the traditional literature, but rather on more realistic labour...

The article shows that reservations in Europe against Turkey's future membership are really groundless. A Muslim nation already was a member of the EU: Algeria. When Algeria was still a colony, it joined the EU (then: European Economic Community) on January 1st 1958 as a French "Departement",...