Restricting attention to quasi-linear utility functions, we examine in the paper the distributive incidence of income taxes used to finance the production of a single public good.

This paper seeks to evaluate the findings of cross-national research on the relationship between income inequality and democracy and to assess the prospects of future research in the area.

A class of inequality measures that is a natural companion to the popular Lorenz curve is the class of measures that are linear in incomes. These measures, which include the Gini and S-Gini coefficients, can be interpreted as ethical means of relative deprivation feelings. Their change through...

This paper provides a survey of normative approaches to inequality measurement, to be published as a chapter in a volume of income inequality. We present general methods for deriving ethical inequality indexes from social-evaluation orderings such as the Atkinson-Kolm-Sen and Kolm procedures.

We study the problem of ranking distributions of opportunity sets on the basis of equality.

Skill differentials in wages declined in the 1970's and rose in the 1980's, but aggregate wage inequality grew throughout the period. This divergence remains a puzzle in recent studies of U.S. wage inequality. In this paper the sometimes divergent paths of intergroup and intra-group inequality...