If preferences or budgets are heterogeneous across people (as they clearly are), then individual costof-living indices are also heterogeneous. Thus, any social cost-of-living index faces an aggregation problem. In this paper, we provide a solution to this problem which we call a ’common-scaling’social cost-of-living index (CS-SCOLI). In addition, we describe nonparametric methods for estimating...

In the measurement of inequality, adjustments for differences across households in their demographic composition and in the price regimes they face are usually very simple. Often, nominal expenditure (or income) is adjusted with an expenditure-independent price deflator and a price-independent equivalence scale. I show that using more flexible expendituredependent price deflators and price-depe...

By generalizing the standard solution for 2-person games into n-person cases, this paper develops a new solution concept for cooperative games: the consensus value. We characterize the consensus value as the unique function that satisfies efficiency, symmetry, the quasi dummy property and additivity. By means of the transfer property, a second characterization is provided. By defining the stand...

In a model in which agents di↵er in wages and preferences over labor time–consumption bundles, we study labor income tax schemes that alleviate poverty. To avoid conflict with individual well-being, we require redistribution to take place between agents on both sides of the poverty line provided they have the same labor time. This requirement is combined with e ciency and robustness properties....

We study the behavior of rules for the adjudication of conflicting claims when there are a large number of claimants with small claims. We model such situations by replicating some basic problem. We show that under replication, the random arrival rule (O’Neill, 1982) behaves like the proportional rule, the rule that is the most often recommended in this context. Also, under replication, the min...

So far, the theory of distributive justice has tried to single out a unique criterion of justice. However, different people hold conflicting ideas about justice. We propose a procedure for representing these individual opinions by means of ``aspiration functions.'' We present three different ways of aggregating such opposing opinions into a socially acceptable judgement. Furthermore, we show th...

Interpersonal Comparisons of Utility: An Algebraic Characterization of Projective Preorders and Some Welfare Consequences It is shown that any completely preordered topological real algebra admits a continuous utility representation which is an algebra-homomorphism (i.e., it is linear and multiplicative). As an application of this result, we provide an algebraic characterization of the projecti...

This paper analyzes a family of rules for bankruptcy problems that generalizes the Talmud rule (T) and encompasses both the constrained equal-awards rule (A) and the constrained equal-losses rule (L). The family is defined by means of a parameter θ ∈ [0, 1] that can be interpreted as a measure of the distributive power of the rule. We provide a systematic study of the structural properties of t...

Abstract The relationship between trade and inequality is complex, the existing literature concludes that impacts of on are ambiguous. This article addresses this ambiguity presents robust evidence effects depend economic development, when it occurred in recent decades, their various measures. It proposes a novel identification strategy to solve for endogeneity problem by using as predicted gra...

We study top trading cycles in a two-sided matching environment (Abdulkadiroglu and Sonmez (2003)) under the assumption that individuals’ preferences and objects’ priorities are drawn iid uniformly. The distributions of agents’ preferences and objects’ priorities remaining after a given round of TTC depend nontrivially on the exact history of the algorithm up to that round (and so need not be u...