How should we make value judgments about wealth inequality? Harsanyi (1953) proposes to take an individual who evaluates her well-being by expected utility and ask her to evaluate the wealth possibilities ex-ante (i.e. before she finds her place in society, i.e., under the "veil of ignorance" of...

This paper develops a normative approach to the measurement of ex-ante inequality of opportunity in a multidimensional setting - that is, when the individual outcome is represented by a multidimensional variable. We characterize three classes of social welfare functions, all endorsing ex-ante...

The paper criticizes the conception of value on behalf of the conventional economic theory, blaming it for the current economic school’s incapacity to explain the actual economic crisis and to offer an adequate perspective to settle a solution. It proposes an explanation based on the tendency...

We examine the dynamic evolution of incomes, both disposable and gross, for several groups in the PSID panel data at several points from 1968 to 1997. We employ the extended Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests of First and Second Order Stochastic Dominance (SD) as implemented by Maasoumi and Heshmati...

We propose a method of measuring and decomposing inequity in health care utilization that allows for heterogeneity in the use-need relationship. This makes explicit inequity that derives from unequal treatment response to variation in need, as well as that due to differential effects of non-need...

Education is a major source of inequality of opportunity, since it has long-lasting effects in various areas such as the labor market. By consequence, public policies aiming at reducing inequality of opportunity in education are likely to have broader effects on the dynamics of inequality in...

We compare absolute, relative and intermediate views on the evolution of global inequality between 1980 and 2009. According to the relative view, inequality remains invariant after a uniform proportional change of all incomes whereas the absolute view requires invariance to a uniform change of...