We endow individuals that differ in skill levels and tastes for working with altruistic preferences for redistribution in a voting model where a unidimensional redistributive parameter is chosen by majority voting in a direct democracy. When altruistic preferences are desert-sensitive, i.e. when...

This paper reports an experimental study on three well-known solutions for problems of adjudicating con icting claims: the constrained equal-awards, the proportional, and the constrained equal-losses rules. We first let subjects play three games designed such that the unique equilibrium...

In this paper we study the optimal design of a long term care policy in a setting that includes three types of care to dependent parents: public nursing homes, financial assistance by children and assistance in time by children. The instruments are public nursing homes and subsidies to aiding...

In this paper we model an overlapping generations economy in which individuals are endowed with a renewable resource. This resource can be exploited at no cost by the young households and provided to production. A joy-of-giving bequest motive motivates the transfer of the unexploited resource to...

The idea of family altruism is that parents care only about their children's income and not about the use of this income made by the children. First, we establish dynamical properties which place the OLG model with family altruism halfway between the model with pure life-cyclers (Diamond (1965))...

There have been many criticisms of Barro's theorem on Ricardian equivalence, but these criticisms apply mainly to a "special form" of Barro's model and there are different possible interpretations of this model. We study another very simple model in which altruism is limited. The effects of...

This paper proposes a simple OLG model which is consistent with the essential facts about consumer behavior, capital accumulation and wealth distribution, and yields some new and surprising conclusions about fiscal policy. By considering a society in which individuals are distinguished according...

We investigate how to extend bankruptcy rules to the general setting in which agents'claims may refer to different issues. We show that the proportional rule is the only one whose extensions according to two natural procedures yield the same outcomes.

Many distributional conflicts are characterized by the presence of acquired rights. The basic structure of these conflicts is that of the so-called claims problem, in which an amount of money has to be divided among individuals with differing claims and the total amount available falls short of...