We propose the concept of a universal social ordering, defined on the set of pairs of an allocation and a preference profile of any finite population. It is meant to unify evaluations and comparisons of social states with populations of possibly different sizes with various characteristics. The...

An early death is, undoubtedly, a serious disadvantage. However, the compensation of short-lived individuals has remained so far largely unexplored, probably because it appears infeasible. Indeed, short-lived agents can hardly be identified ex ante, and cannot be compensated ex post. We argue...

This paper provides a normative appraisal of the Canadian equalization transfers system. For that sake, the two-dimensional dominance criteria introduced by Atkinson and Bourguignon(RES, 1982) are used to compare the distributions of private and public good before and after equalization...

Considering an economy with two goods {a private good and a household good with a variable degree of publicness {and identical individuals, the paper investigates the implications for economies of size of two extreme households' decision rules: (i) the cooperative model, where households...

In a model where agents have unequal skills and heterogeneous preferences about consumption goods and leisure, this paper studies how to combine linear commodity taxes and non-linear income tax. It proposes a particular social welfare function on the basis of fairness principles. It then derives...

We draw some lessons from the Tunisian experience of social reforms and associated unrest. Our main interest is the riots that occurred after subsidy cuts and the attempts at substitution of price subsidies by direct cash transfers. We propose new welfare indicators to assess reforms in such...

This article discusses the properties of Kolm’s ELIE proposal in the Context of optimal income taxation “à la Mirrlees”. It first shows that ELIE gives rise to non-standard type-dependent budget sets, which has important implications in terms of a minimum labour requirement. Second, it...

This paper provides a robust normative evaluation of the spectacular growth episode that India has experienced in the last 15 years. Specifically, the paper compares the evolution, between 1998, 1996 and 2001 of the distribution of several important individual attributes on the basis of...

In this paper, we characterize and empirically implement robust normative criteria for comparing societies on the basis of their allocations of risks among their members. Risks are modelled as lotteries on the set of distributions of state-contingent pecuniary consequences. Individuals are...

This article examines the link between restrictions on the number of physicians and general practitioners’ (GPs) earnings. Using a representative panel of 6016 French self-employed GPs over the years 1983–2004, we estimate an earnings function to identify experience, time and cohort effects....