Abstract We examine the role of need satisfaction in non-comparative justice ratings of endowments with goods. As normative approaches, we discuss utilitarianism, prioritarianism, and three versions of sufficientarianism. Using a vignette experiment with 109 participants, we elicit the...

Abstract Meritocratic beliefs are often invoked as justification for inequality. We provide evidence on how meritocratic beliefs are shaped by economic rewards and how they contribute to the moral justification of inequality. In a large-scale survey experiment in the US, we show that economic...

Abstract The measurement of preferences often relies on surveys in which individuals evaluate hypothetical scenarios. This paper proposes and validates a novel factorial survey tool to measure fairness preferences. We examine whether a non-incentivized survey captures the same distributional...

Abstract We present findings of an experimental study of negotiations over the share of a monetary loss. Groups of four agents with differing initial endowments must unanimously agree on the contribution that each member is expected to make so that a financial loss imposed on the group is...

Excessive work among adolescents may compromise educational development. Without home appliances, household work can take over 50 h a week and an additional 30 h when an infant is present. School-aged girls are often tasked with doing laundry, which is time-consuming and inflexible without a...

Sen ( 1973 and 1997) presents the Gini coefficient of income inequality in a population as follows. “In any pair-wise comparison the man with the lower income can be thought to be suffering from some depression on finding his income to be lower. Let this depression be proportional to the...

Earnings inequality in Germany has increased dramatically. Measuring inequality locally at the level of cities annually since 1985, we find that behind this development is the rapidly worsening inequality in the largest cities, driven by increasing earnings polarisation. In the cross-section,...

Standard growth incidence curves describe how growth episodes impact on the overall income distribution. However, measuring the pro-poorness of the growth process is complex due to measurement errors, and to the effect of shocks that may hit the percentiles of the income distribution in...

Based on data from the Eurosystem Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS), we revisit the question of how differences in household characteristics can account for cross-country differences in wealth inequality. We first show that commonly used RIF-decompositions are typically tested...