Essays on the theory of wealth redistribution.

Summary This theoretical public economics thesis distinguishes four fundamental areas of inquiry that make up the general theory of wealth redistribution: the institutional problem, the normative problem, the positive economic problem, and the positive political problem. The first problem is that of pareto-optimal institutions for redistributing income and wealth: we show how making individual transfers dependent on the distribution of income predicted by the rest of society allows us to redistribute without disincentive costs, and thus to enlarge considerably the set of possible redistributions. The second problem is that of distributive justice: a fair redistribution of work and wealth is defined by a property of "maximum equal freedom" with respect to work and consumption, and a plausible restriction on individual preferences avoids any impossibility paradox. The third problem is that of the spontaneous generation and evolution of inequality: in the presence of imperfections in the capital market, there may be several stationary distributions of wealth associated with different interest rates. The fourth problem is that of the redistributive policy actually followed: in the absence of a majority winner, the political equilibrium may be the product of political conservatism, which is a source of discontinuity.