Welfare comparisons of income distributions and family size: An individualistic approach

Marc Fleurbaey, Cyrille Hagneré and Alain Trannoy
Additional contact information
Cyrille Hagneré: Agence centrale des organismes de Sécurité sociale

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: We investigate the problem of how to perform comparisons of income distributions across families of different sizes. We argue that social welfare ought to be computed as the average individual utility instead of the average household utility as in most known criteria. We provide dominance criteria which allow for some indeterminacy about the average optimal family size, by resorting to the bounded approach to dominance analysis proposed by Fleurbaey et al. (2003). Indeed, when differences in needs come from family size, a specific population allocation problem (how a population should be optimally divided over families for given resources) adds to the usual income allocation problem. Pro-family and anti-family stances are introduced in order to make explicit the choice of an optimal family size. An application to French data shows that shifting from the household to the individualistic point of view can substantially alter the outlook of dominance results.

Keywords: comparison; Dominance; Equivalence scale; Family size; Welfare; Welfare comparison (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Journal of Mathematical Economics, 2014, 51 (C), pp.12--27. ⟨10.1016/j.jmateco.2014.02.006⟩

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Journal Article: Welfare comparisons of income distributions and family size: An individualistic approach (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-01474426

DOI: 10.1016/j.jmateco.2014.02.006

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().