Welfare Comparisons of Income Distributions and Family Size

Marc Fleurbaey, Cyrille Hagneré () and Alain Trannoy
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Cyrille Hagneré: OFCE, IDEP

No 702, IDEP Working Papers from Institut d'economie publique (IDEP), Marseille, France

Abstract: We investigate the problem of how to make welfare comparisons of income distributions hen a 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: the individual well-being either increases or decreases with family size for a given per capita income. We argue that one should use average individual utility, rather than average household utility. 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).

Keywords: Family Size; Dominance; Equivalence Scale; Welfare Comparison. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D13 D31 D63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 47 pages
Date: 2007-01-16, Revised 2007-01-16
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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