Welfare, inequality and the transformation of incomes the case of weighted income distributions

Weighted Income Distributions, Inequality and Welfare Comparisons, Income Transformation, D31, D63, H24,

Inequality and envy

Our purpose is to examine the “envy” within the context of income inequality measurement. We use a simple axiomatic structure that takes into account “envy” in the income distribution. The concept of envy incorporated here concerns the distance of each person's income from his or her immediately richer neighbour. We derive two classes of inequality indices – absolute and relative. The envy concept is shown to be similar to justice concepts based on income relativities. This is the first time a complete characterisation has been provided for envy-related inequality

Income Taxation with Labor Responses

When incomes are exogenously given, U. Jakobsson ( Journal of Public Economics s 5 (1976), 161-168) proved that a progressive tax structure always reduces inequality. We investigate the implications for effective progression of relaxing the assumption of exogenous incomes when individuals have the same preferences but different talents. We extend the standard result and conclude that it is generally impossible to disentangle the respective contributions to inequality reduction of the tax schedule and agents' preferences. For a linear tax schedule to result in less unequally distributed incomes it is sufficient that the elasticity of labor supply be nonincreasing in exogenous income and nondecreasing in productivities. The latter condition proves to be necessary and sufficient when the tax schedule is proportional. Copyright 2007 Blackwell Publishing, Inc..

Equal sacrifice and fair burden-sharing in a public goods economy

Public goods, Cooperative solutions, Fairness, Egalitarian-equivalent solutions, H41,

Household decisions and equivalence scales

Equivalence scales, Household decision rule, Economies of size, D31, D63,