I study a model where personal income is a function of two different groups of individual characteristics, called "irrelevant" and "relevant" respectively. The distinction between these two groups is that society has taken the prior decision that the influence of traits from the first group...

Fighting poverty is one of the main goals in the most societies. This is usually done by the transferring resources to the poor. There exists a widespread view that the European countries are more generous to the poor than the United States. We study whether this is really the case. Firts we...

The provision of pensions for the old and public education for the young represent a large share of public budgets. In most Western countries, current Social Security systems are under a big financial stress. Several reforms have been proposed to solve this problem. This paper deals with the...

This paper studies, both theoretically and experimentally, frame effects in the context of a public good game in which players have to make a costly contribution either i) to achieve or ii) not to lose a non excludable monetary prize. Our protocol leads to public good provision (not...

The financing of higher education through public spending imposes a transfer of resources from taxpayers to the university students and their parents. We provide an explanation for this phenomenon. Those who attend higher education will earn more income in the future and will pay more taxes....

The Spanish population will experience a significant aging in the coming years. This demographic change will impose a heavy burden on the national budget. In particular, expenditure on pensions and health care will grow much faster than productivity. Some authors believe that immigration could...

In this paper we study several methods of ranking profiles ofopportunity sets by taking as a primary notion equality of opportunity,undestood as equality of choice sets. Each of these social decision ruleslooks first at the size of the common opportunity set available to allmembers of the...