We analyze a society that cares about inequality of opportunity. We propose adynamic setting in which effort is a decision variable that individuals adopt as asolution of an explicit utility maximization program. Effort determines themonetary outcome and it depends on the individual¿s...

This paper investigates the effect of health shocks on household consumption and child nutrition. Using longitudinal data from rural Colombia we find that several items of household consumption, including medical expenditure, food consumption, and total consumption, increase following a recent...

We study the incentive problem between the owners of a firm and its CEO's due to the unobservability of the manager's actions. Our model departs from the literature in two ways. First, we acknowledge that, in contrast with standard repeated moral hazard models, actions taken by CEO's have a...

This paper studies the business cycle dynamics of the income and wealth distributions in the context of the neoclassical growth model where agents are heterogeneous in initial wealth and non-acquired skills. Our economy admits a representative consumer which enables us to characterize the...

We derive a parametric formula of the Watts' poverty index for the bivariate lognormal distribution of price indices and nominal living standards. This enables us to analyze the contributions of price and nominal living standard distributions to poverty, to estimate poverty when only means and...

It is not known to what extent welfare measures result from seasonal and geographical price differences rather than from differences in living standards across households. Using data from Rwanda in 1983, we show that the change in mean living standard indicators caused by local and seasonal...

This paper proposes a dominance approach to study well-being inequality across countries at the world level. We consider a class of well-being indices based on the three attributes considered in the HDI (Human Development Index). Indices are required to satisfy preference for egalitarian...

The living standard indicator in utilitarian social evaluation functions (USEF) is the ratio of a nominal living standard and a price index. We show that under weak association of price indices and nominal living standards and usual concavity conditions on utility functions, utilitarian social...