The article adapts the Rawlsian idea of decision-making behind the veil of ignorance in the realm of income transfer systems. As rational decision-makers we would plan a society where the incidence of poverty is low, differences in the level of living between life cycles are small, income...

Which inequalities among individuals are considered unjust? This paper reports the results of an experiment designed to study distributive choices dealing with arbitrarily unequal initial endowments. In a three-person distribution problem where subjects either know or do not know their...

This paper discusses the concept of resourcism' as an alternative to the capability approach. It argues that the term economic resources covers too many different concepts for the term resourcism to be useful when analysing distributional justice. In particular, the resourcism of Dworkin is...

This paper analyses Rawls's celebrated difference principle, and its lexicographic extension, in societies with a finite and an infinite number of agents. A unified framework of analysis is set up, which allows one to characterise Rawlsian egalitarian principles by means of a weaker version of a...

Why might the European member states seek for Fiscal Union? Coordination, macro-stability purposes and provision of (European) public goods are certainly goals of paramount importance for the implementation of Fiscal Union at European level. However, there is an equally important component of...

We first build a fair wage model in which effort varies over the business cycle. This mechanism decreases the need for other sources of sluggishness to explain the observed high inflation persistence. Second, we confront empirically our fair wage model with a New Keynesian model based on the...

The literature of welfare-maximising greenhouse gas emission reduction strategies pays remarkably little attention to equity. This paper introduces three ways to consider efficiency and equity simultaneously. The first method, inspired by Kant and Rawls, maximises net present welfare, without...

In the first section of the study, we analyze the cross-sectional relationship between poverty rates and the income level of the poor. Thereafter, we take a close look at changes in time: how poverty and 'richness' rates and changes in the income of the poor and the rich are related to each...