Portability of social benefits across professions and countries is an increasing concern for individuals and policy makers. Lacking or incomplete transfers of acquired social rights are feared to negatively impact individual labor market decisions as well as capacity to address social risks with...

This arrticle analyzes the determinants of voluntary contribution to environmental quality by introducing the perception of the environmental risk. The environmental quality is assumed uncertain and influenced by current quality and individuals' contributions. We consider individuals who are...

Most of the Social Welfare Functions available in the literature are Paretian, that is increase in anybody's income in the society is welfare augmenting. The Sen type social welfare function possesses this property as well. However, Paretianity is normative criteria and might not be accepted by...

The aim of this paper is to estimate the trend of social welfare for Australia using 1983-84, 1988-89 and 1993-94 Household Expenditure Survey data. The functional form of the Social Welfare Function (SWF) was derived by Sen, Degum, Yitzhaki and Shesinski (all independently). Since the function...

Little is known about the long-term effects of participation in Head Start. This paper draws on unique non-experimental data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to provide new evidence on the effects of participation in Head Start on schooling attainment, earnings, and criminal behavior....

The Social Welfare Function (SWF) is a decision rule to rank alternative social states in a complete fashion in terms of social welfare. This paper questions the philosophy of Paretian Principle as a desirable property of the SWF. It shows that it is possible to generalize the widely used Sen...

In spite of some cutbacks in entitlements, many welfare states' spending has continuously increased over the past decades, leading to larger tax burdens and often higher marginal tax rates. Proposals for reform often facus on reduced social insurance benefits and more actuarial insurance premia....

This paper provides an axiomatic characterization of two rules for comparing alternative sets of objects on the basis of the diversity that they offer. The framework considered assumes a finite universe of objects and an a priori given ordinal quadernary relation that compares alternative pairs...

This paper discusses methodological principles for social evaluation of tax systems and tax reforms when concern is primarily turned to who gains and who loses. The discussion is followed by an empirical analysis based on Italian household data. Using a household microeconometric labor supply...

The hypothesis of non-satiation of rational choice theory is very seldom posed under scrutiny, maybe because it is taken as an anthropologic reality. Looking closer to that, we discover that it is taken for granted only in economic theory, and that it has become a reality as a result of a...