Wealthy individuals often voluntarily provide public goods that the poor also consume. Such philanthropy is perceived as legitimizing one’s wealth. Governments routinely exempt the rich from taxation on grounds of their charitable expenditure. We examine the normative logic of this exemption....

This paper analyzes the problem of deriving predictions, regarding supply behavior of a competitive firm, from prior consistency postulates about input-output choices made by such a firm. It extends the literature by introducing a consistency postulate for firm choice, which is weaker than...

We consider a two-person Cournot game of voluntary contributions to a public good with identical individual preferences, and examine equilibrium aggregate welfare under a separable, symmetric and concave social welfare function. Assuming the public good is pure, Itaya, de Meza and Myles (Econ....

We model a general choice environment via probabilistic choice correspondences, with (possibly) incomplete domain and infinite universal set of alternatives. We offer a consistency restriction regarding choice when the feasible set contracts. This condition, ‘contraction consistency’,...

Under pressure from a progressive social movement, the British government in Bengal passed the (Hindu) Widow Remarriage Act in 1856. Yet few such remarriages subsequently occurred. Standard explanations for this failure rest on demand side arguments – few contemporary men were enlightened...

We examine the case for maintaining welfare and income redistribution programs even when their adverse general equilibrium effects reduce total earnings of poor households. Using a Cournot model of intra-household decision-making, we show that even if welfare cutbacks generate large increases in...

We develop an integrated, general equilibrium, model of how the presence of vertical ties of ‘community’ between sections of workers and sections of capitalists can critically affect the distribution of income between capitalists as a class and workers as a class, as well as between workers...

We analyze conflicts between communities. A community-specific public good, to which members make voluntary contributions, defines communities. Some, but not all, members of one community may contribute towards another community’s public good. Such ‘bridging’ contributions will not occur...

We investigate how vertical unity within a community interacts with horizontal class divisions of an unequal income distribution. Community is conceptualized in terms of a public good to which all those in the community have equal access, but from which outsiders are excluded. We formulate the...