The paper provides estimates of the effect of economic inequality on middle class well being in Switzerland. Economic well being is proxied by a person’s satisfaction with his/her income. Two inequality indicators are used, one standard (the Gini coefficient of the pre-tax income distribution) and one novel (the number of luxury car registrations per 1000 population). Identification is through ...

The variance in the logarithms of per capita GDP in purchasing-power-parity prices increased in the world from 1960 to 1968 and decreased since the mid 1970s. In the later period the convergence in intercountry incomes more than offset any increase in within country inequality. Approximately two-thirds of this measure of world inequality is intercountry, three-tenths interhousehold within count...

We solve the nonlinear income tax program for rank-dependent social welfare functions, expressing trade-off between size and inequality using Gini related families of positional indices. Absent bunching, ranks in actual optimal allocations are invariant. Exploiting this feature, we provide new, simple, intuitive formulas both quasilinear additive cases new comparative static results. Our approa...

This paper uses a cross-state panel for the United States over the 1976 to 2007 period to assess the relationship between income inequality and the inflation rate. Employing a semiparametric instrument variable (IV) estimator, we find that the relationship depends on the level of the inflation rate. A positive relationship occurs only if the states exceed a threshold level of inflation rate. Be...

The paper describes within-neighborhood economic segregation in U.S. metropolitan areas in 1985 and 1993. It uses the neighborhood clusters of the American Housing Survey, standardized by metropolitan area income and household size, to explore income distribution within neighborhoods at a scale much smaller than the census tract (a representative sample of households or ‘kernels’ and their ten ...

In a matching model of firm formation with moral hazard, we characterize the equilibrium for economies with scarcity of capital and study the effects of redistributive taxation. We give necessary and sufficient conditions determining the equilibrium matching patterns, payoffs and interest rate. These depend only on aggregate wealth and the median wealth relative to the active population, compar...

This paper investigates the relationship between growth and inequality from a demographic point of view. In an extended model of the accidental bequest with endogenous fertility, we analyze the effects of a decrease in the old-age mortality rate on the equilibrium growth rate as well as on the income distribution. We show that the relationship between growth and inequality is at first positive ...

The Public Perception and Normative Valuation of Executive Compensation: An International Comparison This paper describes individuals’ perceptions and normative valuations of executive compensation using comparable survey data for fifteen OECD member countries. An overwhelming majority of individuals (more than 90%) believes that top executives earn more than they actually deserve. However, the...

I study a problem of repeated moral hazard in which the effect of effort is persistent over time: each period’s outcome distribution is a function of a geometrically distributed lag of past efforts. I show that when the utility of the agent is linear in effort, a simple rearrangement of terms in his lifetime utility translates this problem into a related standard repeated moral hazard. The solu...

Majority voting and social evaluation functions are the main alternatives proposed in the literature for aggregatingindividual preferences. Despite these being very different, this papershows that the ranking of income distributions, symmetric under the same transformation, by S-Gini consistent social evaluation functions and majority voting coincide if and only if the inequality index under co...