This paper shows how two important interregional transfer schemes,the foundation grant and the power equalization grant, can be seen as two different interpretations of equal opportunity ethics. It provides characterizations of both transfer schemes by the use of basic liberal egalitarian...

According to liberal egalitarian ethics, individuals should be rewarded for factors under their control, but not for factors outside their control. A fundamental challenge to liberal egalitarian theories of justice is how to do this without violating minimal egalitarian and liberal requirements....

A liberal egalitarian theory of justice seeks to combine the values of equality, personal freedom and personal responsibility. It is considered a much more promising position than strict egalitarianism, because it supposedly provides a fairness argument for inequalities reflecting differences in...

Parents influence their children's adult outcomes through economic and genetic endowments, transmission of cultural values and social skills, and through choice of residential location. Using a variance decomposition framework which provides bounds on the effect of families and neighbourhoods,...

We show that the recent rise in Afghan opium production is caused by violent conflicts. Violence destroys roads and irrigation, crucial to alternative crops, and weakens local incentives to rebuild infrastructure and enforce law and order. Exploiting a unique data set, we show that Western...

In many countries extreme poverty is unnecessary. Yet it persists. We propose a simple index, denoted the Miser index, to measure the extent to which societies have poverty in the midst of affluence. It builds on the generalized Lorenz curve, but can also be seen as a measure of polarization...

By incorporating positional dynamics into a conflict model relevant to battlefields and politics, we show that the conditions that induce regime stability can also induce hard conflicts. We show that in contests with incumbent-challenger turnover, i) asymmetric power across groups and positions...

Divided societies in the developing world experience wasteful struggles for power. We study the relationship between political stability and resources wasted in the struggle within a model of competitive power contests. The model of power contests is similar in structure to models describing...

Unproductive enterprises that feed on productive businesses, are rampant in developing countries. These parasitic enterprises take divergent forms, some headed by violent bandits and brutal mafia bosses, others by organized middlemen or smart political insiders. All of them seem to have the...

A dynamic macroeconomic model is used to analyze the interaction between economic growth, labor demand and crime. Due to endogenous crime, the model exhibits increasing returns to aggregate capital at certain development levels. At other development levels, however, there are decreasing returns...