Egalitarian theorists, since Rawls, have in the main advocated equalizing some objective measure of individual well-being, such as primary goods, functioning, or resources, rather than subjective welfare. This discussion, however, has assumed, implicitly, a static environment. By analyzing a...

A substantial literature examines second-best environmental policy, focusing particularly on how the Pigouvian directive that marginal taxes should equal marginal external harms needs to be modified in light of the preexisting distortion due to labor income taxation. Additional literature is...

This paper looks at public governance issues, such as efficiency, equity, fairness and transparency, related to government taxation and expense on human capital. Taxation of human capital requires ability to measure it. The paper proposes a new method of measuring human capital using the...

This chapter examines the role of altruistic motives in the economic analysis of public social transfers, both from a positive and from a normative point of view. The positive question is to know whether we can fully neglect altruistic considerations to explain the development or sustainability...

Many distributive issues involve situations in which initial characteristics make individuals unequal. In view of prevailing moral sentiments, some of these characteristics call for compensating transfers, and some do not. We study the literature on this problem of compensation. This literature...

Forty-two percent of Americans give different answers when asked, respectively, about the reasons for being rich and the reasons for being poor. We develop and test a theo-ry about support for redistribution in the presence of target-specific beliefs about the causes of low and high incomes. Our...

The ability-to-pay approach assesses taxes paid as a sacrifice by the taxpayers. This raises the question of how to define and how to measure it: in absolute, relative, or marginal terms? U.S. respondents prefer a tax schedule that is either a pure (absolute) Equal Sacrifice or a mixture of...

This paper reports the results of experiments designed to examine whether a taste for fairness affects people's preferred tax structure. Building on the Fehr and Schmidt (1999) model, we devise a simple test for the presence of social preferences in voting for alternative tax structures. The...

This paper offers recommendations about how we can promote economic justice in the face of globalization. At the outset this paper discusses the dramatic increase in earnings and income inequality since the 1970s, about the time when globalization took off. Next, this paper considers the...

Does it matter for the success of fiscal consolidation programmes that they are fair? This question has never been empirically addressed despite its profound importance especially since many developed countries have embarked on fiscal consolidation programmes, which in many cases have led to...