Much has happened in the theory of distributive justice during the last 30 years, in the period, roughly, since Rawls published his magisterial work1. As occurs in most fields following a great contribution, that work has been subjected to critique, amended and ramified, so that what Rawls...

Why do both left and right political parties typically propose progressive income taxation schemes in political competition? Analysis of this problem has been hindered by the two-dimensionality of the issue space. To give parties a choice over a domain which contains both progressive and...

This paper surveys the evidence, theoretical and empirical, relating to the possibility of achieving more egalitarian distributions of income than are typical in modern societies. The first four parts of the paper (Introduction, Improving efficiency an equality, The ownership of firms, and...

In 1980, government transfers as a fraction of GNP in OECD countries varied from 30.4% in Belgium to 11.1% in Greece. In this paper, we seek a political-economic explanation of this variation. In particular, we shall attempt to explain the variation as due to a variation in preferences of the...

The Downsian model, in which candidates care only about winning elections and parties play no role, has been hegemonic in formal political theory for forty years. In the past fifteen years, various authors have worked with a model of electoral competition in which competing parties represent...

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

This project employs the theory of opportunity, described in Roemer''s book (Equality of Opportunity, Harvard University Press, 1998), to compute the extent to which tax-and-transfer regimes in ten countries equalize opportunities among citizens for income acquisition. Roughly speaking, equality...

In 1959, Lloyd Shapley wrote a short paper on games with vector payoffs. He analyzed zero-sum matrix games. Here, we extend Shapley's equilibrium concept to general games with vector payoffs, introduce an organizational interpretation of the concept, elaborate the relationship of the original...