Erwin Ooghe

Equality of opportunity versus equality of opportunity sets

We characterize two different approaches to the idea of equality of opportunity. Roemer’s social ordering is motivated by a concern to compensate for the effects of certain (non-responsibility) factors on outcomes. Van de gaer’s social ordering is concerned with the equalization of the opportunity sets to which people have access. We show how different invariance axioms open the possibility to go beyond the simple additive specification implied by both rules. This offers scope for a broader interpretation of responsibility-sensitive egalitarianism.

The Incidence of Social Security Contributions: An Empirical Analysis

We estimate the effect of social security contributions on wagecosts with sectoral panel data from Eurostat. More than half of the burden of thesecontributions is borne by the employees. Shifting of the burden towards theemployees is more pronounced if the reciprocity between contributions and benefits is stronger. These findings are in line with the predictions derived from anefficient bargaining model.

Equity and Efficiency in Private and Public Education: A Nonparametric Comparison

We present a nonparametric approach for the equity and efficiency evaluation of (private and public) primary schools in Flanders. First, we use a nonparametric (Data Envelopment Analysis) model that is specially tailored to assess educational efficiency at the pupil level. The model accounts for the fact that minimal prior structure typically available for the behavior (objectives and feasibility set) under evaluation, it reckons with outlier behavior in the available data, while it corrects for ‘environmental’ characteristics that are specific to each pupil. Second, we propose first- and second-order stochastic dominance (FSD and SSD) criteria as naturally complementary aggregation criteria for comparing the performance of different school types (private and public schools) in Flanders. While FSD only accounts for (Pareto) efficiency, SSD also takes (Pigou-Dalton) equality into consideration. We find that private schools outperform public schools in terms of SSD.

Weighting with Individuals, Equivalent Individuals or not Weighting at all. Does it Matter Empirically?

To take into account heterogeneity in a social welfare function, Ebert (1997) and Shorrocks (1995) show that the only consistent way of welfare measurement consists of either constructing an artificial distribution in which each household is weighted by the number of equivalent individuals, or weighting by the number of individuals in the household. Both approaches are not only mutually exclusive on axiomatic grounds, they are also in sharp contrast with many empirical applications where there is no weighting at all. Since ultimately, the choice is a normative one between axioms, and hence not easily envisaged, an empirical test of the sensitivity of welfare evaluations for the choice of the different weighting schemes might prove useful. In this paper we apply the different methods to administrative microdata of the 2000 PIT reform in Belgium, obtained from the microsimulation model SIRe of the Belgian Ministery of Finance. We find indeed sensitivity of our results with respect to the different weighting methods. In addition, using the number of equivalent individuals as weights to perform dominance analysis leads to fanciful results with respect to the choice of equivalence scales.

A consistent multidimensional Pigou-Dalton transfer principle

The Pigou-Dalton principle demands that a regressive transfer decreases social welfare. In the unidimensional setting this principle is consistent, because regressivity in terms of attribute amounts and regressivity in terms of individual well-being coincide in the case of a single attribute. In the multidimensional setting, however, the relationship between the various attributes and well-being is complex. To formulate a multidimensional Pigou-Dalton transfer principle, a concept of wellbeing must therefore first be defined. We propose a version of the Pigou-Dalton principle that defines regressivity in terms of the individual well-being ranking that underlies the social ranking on which the principle is imposed. This well-being ranking (of attribute bundles) is induced from the social ranking over distributions in which all individuals have the same attribute bundle. It is shown that this new principle—the consistent Pigou-Dalton principle—imposes a quasi-linear structure on the well-being ranking. We discuss the implications of this result within the literature on multidimensional inequality measurement and within the literature on needs.

Fair and Efficient Taxation under Partial Control: Theory and Evidence

There is clear evidence that fairness plays a role in redistribution. Individuals want to compensate others for their misfortune, while they allow them to enjoy the fruits of their effort. This paper introduces fairness in a tax-benefit scheme that is based on several characteristics in order to study the design of optimal taxes where people have what we call ‘partial control’. For some characteristics like sex, age and inborn handicaps the degree of control is zero (i.e., these characteristic are exogenous tags fully defined by the individual’s type), while for other characteristics, think of education and family composition, the degree of control is positive, i.e. it can be changed by exerting effort. We derive the fair tax benefit formula as well as two testable predictions. We provide the first estimates of implicit tax rates for different characteristics in 26 European countries (using EU-SILC data) and the US (using CPS data) and find a robust tendency in all countries to compensate more for uncontrollable characteristics compared to the partially controllable ones. We then attempt to calculate which countries currently have fair tax systems. Only the Continental countries France and Luxembourg pass the fairness test, whereas the Baltic and Anglo-Saxon countries (including the US) perform worst. Our paper provides a new way to formalize the old intuition that, in a fair society, people should be allowed to benefit more from their own efforts than from exogenous characteristics like their genetic endowment.

On bounded dominance criteria

A well-known criterion to make heterogeneous welfare comparisons is Atkinson and BourguignonÂ’s (1987) sequential generalized Lorenz dominance (SGLD) criterion. Recently, Fleurbaey, HagnerA© and Trannoy (2003) convincingly argue that it contains unreasonable household utility profiles and suggest to put (lower and upper) bounds on the needs of the different household types. First, we generalize Atkinson and BourguignonÂ’s SGLD criterion, by introducing lower bounds in the household utility profiles. Second, we propose a new SGLD criterion by introducing upper bounds in a similar way. Third, we impose lower and upper bounds simultaneously and obtain a criterion which is intermediate between EbertÂ’s (1999) equivalence scale weighted approach and Atkinson and BourguignonÂ’s (1987) SGLD approach.

On comparing heterogeneous populations: Is there really a conflict between welfarism and a concern for greater equality in living standards?

Abstract The standard solution in classical welfare analysis to deal with non-pecuniary characteristics relevant for a normative judgement of income distributions, such as household composition or handicaps, is to adjust first household income via equivalence scales. The resulting equivalent income is then assigned to each household member. Finally, a social evaluation tool is applied to the resulting distribution of individual equivalent incomes (as if all individuals were homogeneous). However, the welfarist approach of the final step risks to be at odds with a concern for greater equality in equivalent incomes (see [Ebert, U., 1997. Social welfare when needs differ: an axiomatic approach. Economica 64, 233–244; Ebert, U., Moyes, P., 2003. Equivalence scales reconsidered. Econometrica 71, 319–343; Shorrocks, A.F., 2004. Inequality and welfare evaluation of heterogeneous income distributions. Journal of Economic Inequality 2, 193–218]). We pinpoint two families of welfarist rankings and show how and why these rules can resolve the tension between the between type Pigou–Dalton transfer principle, a notion of concern for greater equality, and the Pareto indifference criterion, the quintessence of welfarism. We then characterize these families of welfare rankings. This completes the fragmentary picture in the literature of welfarist rankings which can reconcile both principles, limited basically to the maximin and leximin rule.

Prioritarian Poverty Comparisons with Cardinal and Ordinal Attributes

The ethical view of prioritarianism holds the following: if an extra bundle of attributes is to be allocated to either of two individuals, then priority should be given to the worse off among the two. We consider multidimensional poverty comparisons with cardinal and ordinal attributes and propose three axioms that operationalize the prioritarian view. Each priority axiom, in combination with a handful of standard properties, characterizes a class of poverty measures. We provide an empirical application to European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions data. For this application, we develop a unanimity criterion within the setting of a single cardinal attribute (income) augmented by several binary ordinal attributes.

Fair and Efficient Taxation under Partial Control

We study fair and efficient tax-benefit schemes based on income and non-income factors under partial control. Partial control means that each factor is a specific mixture of unobserved ability (randomly drawn by nature) and effort (chosen by individuals who differ in tastes). Factors differ in the degree of control, ranging from no control (if only ability matters) to full control (if only effort matters). Fairness requires to compensate individuals for differences in well-being caused by differences in abilities, while at the same time preserving well-being differences caused by taste differences. We discuss first the general properties of fair and efficient tax-benefit schemes. Next, we study two special cases income taxation and tagging in detail. Finally, we derive testable conditions for the general case and discuss the empirical implementation.