We study the political economy of the environment in autocratic, weak and strong democracies when individuals can either mitigate the health consequences of domestic pollution privately or reduce pollution collectively through public policy. The setting is that of a small open economy in which...

One cannot doubt the ubiquitous lack of hope and confidence in the so-called democratic institutions by the large majority of people. The fundamental reason thereof is the blatant contradiction between the principle of democracy, promoting the rule of law and thereby the welfare of people, and...

Many societies today are experiencing growing inequality in terms of wealth, income, health, education, resources or opportunities, trends that have negative effects upon well-being, trust, and motivation. We investigated whether inequalities –– particularly those perceived as fair ––...

The measurement of Inequality of Opportunity has attracted a lot of attention in recent years, despite of the fact that it is very limited by the scarce availability of data on family background. In this paper we propose a method to overcome this limitation, which consists of using another...

Does inequality hinder or promote cooperation? To answer this question, we study a Prisoner’s Dilemma with local adaptation, to which we add heterogeneity in payoffs. In our model, agents vary in their wealth, and this inequality affects their potential gains and losses. We find that, in such...

Joseph Fishkin’s new book, Bottlenecks, reinvigorates the concept of equal opportunity by simultaneously engaging with its complications and attempting to simplify its ambitions. Fishkin describes bottlenecks as narrow spaces in the opportunity structure through which people must pass if they...

When income inequality increases when average income levels increase, rises in average income levels might result in inequality costs. This paper develops marginal social welfare measures that account for the possibility that income inequality changes when average income levels change....

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...

This paper provides a conceptual framework on fair collective choice rules that synthesizes the studies of Goldman and Sussangkarn (1978) and Suzumura (1981) on the one hand and Tadenuma (2002, 2005) on the other. We show that both frameworks have the following binary relation as a common...

Economic theory suggests that monopoly prices hurt consumers but benefit shareholders. But in a world where individuals or households can be both consumers and shareholders, the impact of market power on inequality depends in part on the relative distribution of consumption and corporate equity...