This paper brings together insights from the literature on wage determination to explore the idea that the labour market contains a dynamic resulting in growing wage differentials between workers with different levels of qualifications. Call this dynamic the centrifugal nature of the labour market. It allows highly qualified workers to obtain cumulative wage premia over time. Few existing accounts of wage determination contain the conceptual resources to make sense of this phenomenon, and even these exceptions do not make it explicit. The paper then goes on to show that from the perspective of several prominent theories of distributive justice, wage differentials due to the centrifugal nature of the labour market will be considered unjust.

Widespread tax evasion and avoidance have recently led to both significant reforms of international tax governance and increased attention from theorists of global tax justice. Against the background of an analysis of the double challenge of effectiveness and distribution facing the taxation of multinational enterprises, this paper puts forward a taxonomy of recent contributions of the tax justice literature. This taxonomy not only opens up an original angle of interpretation on global tax justice, but also provides a vantage point from which to evaluate recent reforms by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Given available technologies, current consumption behaviour is incompatible with the goal of keeping global warming below 2 °C. Economists present carbon pricing as the most efficient tool to induce people to adjust their consumption behaviour. This Perspective critically analyses the ethics, economics and politics of one key form of carbon pricing: carbon taxes are levied to discourage fossil-fuel-intensive consumption. The core claim of this Perspective is that progressive individual carbon taxes (that is, taxes whose rate increases the more emissions an individual generates) are not only more effective but also more just than the flat-rate carbon taxes prevalent today. Carbon taxes face several challenges in practice. This Perspective identifies three such challenges and suggests that, to meet them, carbon taxes should be designed like income taxes. The tax rate of a person should increase with the greenhouse gases the person emits through their consumption.

What explains and justifies factor shares, that is, the returns that workers and capital owners receive on their contribution to economic production? Arguably, neither economic theory nor theories of distributive justice give a satisfactory answer to this question. One important explanation of this shortcoming, this paper argues, lies in the fact that they fail to take the full measure of the phenomenon of increasing returns from specialisation or, as economist often call it, of total factor productivity. This paper aims to fill this gap by asking what follows for distributive justice from taking this phenomenon seriously. The paper proceeds in four steps. First, it demonstrates in detail how a sophisticated division of labour creates a cooperative surplus. Second, it puts forward a counterfactual experiment to measure this surplus. Third and crucially, the paper argues that justice requires an equal division of this surplus and that this idea turns out to be a surprisingly ecumenical one. The final section defends the equal surplus proposal against two objections, namely the suggestion that an equal distribution of the cooperative surplus is either politically unfeasible or economically inefficient.

In recent decades, and in particular since the shift towards independent central banks, there has been no explicit coordination of fiscal and monetary policy. In the Eurozone, this lack of coordination represents an important flaw, especially since the Eurozone is not an optimal currency area. Complementing monetary union with a transfer union represents one possible solution. This paper argues that the negative impact of post-2008 and post-Covid-19 unconventional monetary policy on income inequalities provides a second reason to coordinate fiscal and monetary policy. Among various institutional arrangements to implement such coordination, the paper defends the idea that the European Central Bank should be sensitive to distributive considerations when formulating its monetary policy. Such an arrangement would help both to contain the distributive side-effects of monetary policy and to at least partially remedy the flaw at the heart of the Eurozone as long as an outright transfer union remains unfeasible.

This chapter argues that central banks find themselves between a rock and a hard place when it comes to green central banking. Either they endorse the project, exposing them to the charge that they lack the input legitimacy to do so, or they eschew taking into account climate concerns, thus undermining their output legitimacy. Our discourse analysis of central bankers’s speeches shows that disagreements among officials from the same institution regarding green central banking are grounded on issues outside their core expertise. Furthermore, neither the conservative nor the progressive central bankers defend positions that have the potential to overcome the legitimacy dilemma we formulate.

Tax competition, that is, the practice of designing the tax code of a jurisdiction in order to attract capital from elsewhere, should be regulated. Against the backdrop of a taxonomy of different kinds of tax competition, the chapter makes this case on three grounds. First, tax competition is undemocratic, because it undermines the capacity of political communities to control the fiscal decisions that affect them. Second, tax competition tends to exacerbate unjust inequalities in income and wealth both domestically and globally. Third, tax competition turns out to be inefficient in the sense that the fiscal loopholes characteristic of it lead to optimal tax theory recommending locally efficient tax rates that are too low compared to the globally efficient solution of closing the loopholes.

This paper presents a critical analysis of the stance taken on inequality by two central banks since 2015: the Bank of Canada (BoC) and the Federal Reserve (Fed). The analysis is informed by a computer-assisted discourse analysis of how central bankers from the two institutions position themselves when it comes to issues of inequality. We observe that the position on inequality of the two central banks has changed in recent years and continues to do so. We argue that the stance on inequality taken by the BoC and the Fed suffers from a number of both inconsistencies and shortcomings. On the one hand, the BoC and the Fed claim that monetary policy instruments are too blunt to target specific sectors of the economy. On the other hand, with their response to COVID-19, they have demonstrated that such targeting is possible after all.

Contrary to what theoretical texts espouse, money is an essential social good -ask any family without it.Its distribution is, therefore, highly relevant from the perspective of justice.Printing more physical notes and coins, as any first-year economics student will know, is not the solution.Money 'creation' and its just distribution relies instead on equitable access to credit, which represents the bulk of money in a modern economy.Unfortunately, bias has corroded the mechanisms that govern money creation today; the result is an entrenched injustice that benefits the wealthy at the expense of the poor.This should worry anyone, but it's of particular concern to

Theories of justice rely on a variety of criteria to determine what social arrangements should be considered just. For most theories, the distribution of financial resources matters. However, they take the existence of money as a given and tend to ignore the way in which the creation of money impacts distributive justice. Those with access to collateral are favoured in the creation of credit or debt, which represents the main form of money today. Appealing to the idea that access to credit confers freedom, and that inequalities in this freedom are morally arbitrary, this article shows how the advantage to those with collateral plays out in different ways in today’s economy. The article identifies several forms of bias inherent in money creation, and its subsequent destruction: loans from commercial banks to individuals and corporations, interbank lending, lending from central banks to commercial banks, and selective bail-outs by central banks. These are not mere inequalities: they are unjust since alternative designs of the financial architecture exist that would significantly reduce them. The paper focuses on one possible reform with the potential to address several of the types of bias identified, namely the separation of money creation from private bank credit.

What do we owe participants in collective pension plans in terms of socially responsible investment (SRI)? This paper draws into question current conventional wisdom on SRI, which considers investor engagement a more effective strategy than divestment to change morally problematic corporate behaviour. More fundamentally, in light of reasonable disagreement about the objective of SRI, the paper argues that participants in collective pension plans are owed some kind of control over their investments. The final section considers four different institutional arrangements to respect this requirement in practice, ranging from democratic decision procedures to the availability of SRI alternatives.

Dans cet article, nous présentons deux arguments en faveur d'une attention accrue des banques centrales à l'égard des implications distributives des politiques monétaires. En mobilisant la doctrine du double effet, nous montrons que la responsabilité des banquiers centraux quant aux effets distributifs de leurs politiques monétaires non conventionnelles est engagée. De plus, étant donné que le levier traditionnel de la fiscalité fait face à de sérieuses difficultés aujourd'hui, l'appui des banques centrales pourrait être décisif pour la réduction des inégalités économiques. Nous évaluons ensuite les arguments théoriques et empiriques soulevés par les banquiers centraux contre cette proposition. Nous concluons que ces objections ne minent pas l'attrait d'une responsabilité des banques centrales en matière de distribution.