This forthcoming chapter in the Handbook of Income Distribution (eds., A. Atkinson and F. Bourguignon) summarizes the literature on equality of opportunity. We begin by reviewing the philosophical debate concerning equality since Rawls (sections 1 and 2), present economic algorithms for...

This paper uses a laboratory experiment to explore individuals' motivations for redistribution. The laboratory results show that as income uncertainty diminishes, participants become more extreme in their preferences for redistribution. The findings suggest that for most people, the motivation...

According to Sen (1976), any reasonable poverty index ought to be sensitive to inequality. In a multidimensional framework, inequality between poverty dimensions is traditionally treated as association sensitivity. Such an approach, however, is based exclusively on efficiency considerations,...

Building on earlier work by political philosophers, economists have recently sought to define a concept of equity that accommodates the fairness of reward to individual responsibility and effort, while allowing for the existence of some inequalities which are unfair and should be compensated....

Equality of opportunity is a principle of justice that is built on two fundamental ideas. On the one hand, outcome differences across individuals are unacceptable if they are rooted in factors that are beyond individual control. Examples of such circumstance characteristics are the biological...

Überarb. Beitr. eines Großteils der Vorträge, gehalten während zweier Sitzungen des Ausschusses "Wirtschaftswissenschaften und Ethik" im Verein für Socialpolitik vom 12. bis 14. Februar 1998 an der Univ. Erlangen/Nürnberg und vom 25. bis 27. Februar 1999 an der FernUniv. Hagen