Interest in economic mobility stems largely from its perceived role as an equalizer of opportunities, though not necessarily of outcomes. In this paper we show that this view leads very naturally to a methodology for the measurement of social mobility which has strong parallels with the theory...

We study the problem of ranking distributions of opportunity sets on the basis of equality.

The Lorenz-Pareto Optimal Frontier of a collective choice problem indentifies a (usually quite large) subset of all Pareto optimal outcomes which are not inegalitarian according to the Lorenz criterion. We study the basic properties of Lorenz-Pareto optimal choice functions and in particular...

This paper studies the conditions under which the basic results of the re vealed preference theory can be established on the domain of choice problems which include non-convex feasible sets, the exercice is closely related to the works of Peters and Wakker (1991) and Bossert (1994).

This paper examines how ambiguous notions such as "meritocracy" , "equality of opportunity" and "equality of outcomes" can be given a formal content and related to more standard economic concepts such as social mobility, income inequality, and efficiency.

This paper aims to explain the significant variations in the social contracts which can be observed across nations. It shows in particular how countries with similar technologies and preferences, as well as equally democratic political systems, can sustain very different avrage and marginal tax...