We study all theories of justice that disentangle ethical views on intergenerational discounting and intergenerational inequality. Each “modular” social welfare function is uniquely identified by a time-discounting function—capturing attitudes toward time—and an aggregator function—...

We use an extended Barro-Becker model of endogenous fertility, in which parents are heterogeneous in their labor productivity, to study the efficient degree of consumption inequality in the long run. In our environment a utilitarian planner allows for consumption inequality even when labor...

This chapter reviews the theory of the voluntary public and private redistribution of wealth elaborated by economic analysis in the last forty years or so. The central object of the theory is altruistic gift-giving, construed as benevolent voluntary redistribution of income or wealth. The theory...

How the valuation of environmental goods is related to income is a key question for economics, but the role of income inequality is often neglected. We study how income inequality affects the international transfer of the estimated value of environmental goods from a study to a policy site - a...

Specialized theoretical and empirical research should in principle be embedded in a unified framework that identifies the relevant interactions among different phenomena, enables an appropriate matching of policy instruments to objectives, and grounds normative analysis in individuals' utilities...

In CBA practices around the world, benefits are valued regardless of to whom they accrue. This disregards basic economic principles, like declining marginal utility of income, or inequality aversion. This paper argues that if redistribution matters, net benefits must be aggregated using a...

Conventionally, benefit-cost analysis focuses on economic efficiency, summing the values of a policy’s costs and benefits based on the preferences of those affected. There is widespread agreement that it should be supplemented with information on how the impacts are distributed across...

In this paper, we characterize the relationship between the initial distribution of human capital and physical inheritances among individuals and the long-run distribution of these two variables. In a model with indivisible investment in education, we analyze how the initial distribution of...

In cross-sectional studies, countries with greater income inequality typically exhibit less support for government-led redistribution and greater acceptance of wage inequality (e.g., United States versus Western Europe). If individual nations evolve along this pattern, a vicious cycle could form...

The present paper is part of unpublished book that analyzes the political, social and economic collapse of the Sudan. Economic, social and distributive disparities triggered a process for the disintegration of the nation under the pretext of imposing Islamic Sharia Laws. A pronounced prominent...