The ethic of 'priority' is a compromise between the extremely compensatory ethic of 'welfare equality' and the needs-blind ethic of 'income equality'. We propose an axiom of priority, and characterize resource-allocation rules that are impartial, prioritarian, and solidaristic. They comprise a...

We propose a theory of party competition (two parties, single-issue) where citizens acquire party membership by contributing money to a party, and where a member?s influence on the policy taken by her party is proportional to her campaign contribution. The polity consists of informed and...

Studying a model where trade unions interact with endogenously formed partisan political parties, we explain changing political preferences for and against the unionised labour market regime. We focus on the changes in coalition formation between unskilled and moderately skilled workers, which...

The purpose of this paper is to introduce and adopt a generalised version of Roemer's (1998) Equality of Opportunity (EOp) framework for analysing optimal income taxation. EOp optimal tax rules seek to equalise income differentials arising from factors beyond the control of the individual....

The inter-generational correlation of education in the U.S. is tremendous. For instance, in PSID data from 1990, young males with college-educated parents had a 70% chance of attending college. But those with high school drop-out parents had only a 15% chance. In this paper, we analyze the...

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

It is commonly held that power has been transferred from political parties to candidates in the last fifty years, and that television is the cause. This paper constructs a game-theoretical model of political competition in which a technological innovation, like television, can have this effect....

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...

Utilitarians, egalitarians, prioritarians, and sufficientarians each provide examples of situations demonstrating, often compellingly, that a sensible ethical observer must adopt their view and reject the others. We argue, to the contrary, that an attractive ethic is eclectic, in the sense of...