When individuals’ utility is a convex combination of their income and their concern at having a low relative income (the weights attached to income and to the concern at having a low relative income sum up to one), the ...

We study the assimilation behavior of a group of migrants who live in a city populated by native inhabitants. We conceptualize the group as a community, and the city as a social space. Assimilation increases the productivity ...

In determining the optimal redistribution of a given population’s income, we ask which factor is more important: the social planner’s aversion to inequality, embedded in an isoelastic social welfare function indexed by a ...

This chapter investigates the impact of the imposition of sanctions for employing illegal migrants on the welfare of native laborers. In response to such sanctions, managers in a firm may be reassigned from the supervision ...

We present a theory that systematically and causally links the well-being of native inhabitants with variation in the extent of the assimilation of migrants. Recent empirical findings are yielded as predictions of the theory.

This paper asks whether population growth is conducive to the sustainability of cooperation. A simple model is developed in which farmers who live around a circular lake engage in trade with their adjacent neighbors. The ...

Let a society’s unhappiness be measured by the aggregate of the levels of relative deprivation of its members. When two societies of equal size, F and M, merge, unhappiness in the merged society is shown to be higher than ...

A migration network is modeled as a mutually beneficial cooperative agreement between financially-constrained individuals who seek to finance and expedite their migration. The cooperation agreement creates a network: ...

Under a deadweight loss of tax and transfer, there is tension between the optimal policy choices of a Rawlsian social planner and a utilitarian social planner. However, when with a weight greater than a certain critical ...