We show how normative standpoints determine optimal taxation of wealth. Since wealth is not equal to capital, we find very different welfare implications of land rent-, bequest- and capital taxation. It is mainly land rents that should be taxed. We develop an overlapping generations model with...

When measuring income inequality over long periods of time, accounting for population and productivity growth is important. This paper presents three alternative measures of top income shares that more explicitly account for population and income growth than the standard measure. We apply these...

This paper analyses the relationship between growth patterns, poverty, and inequality in Brazil during its globalization process, focusing on the role played by the labour market and social programmes. Methodologically, the paper makes two contributions to the literature. One is the proposal of...

In recent decades, the immigration of workers and refugees to Europe has increased substantially, and the composition of the population in many countries has consequently become much more heterogeneous in terms of ethnic background. If people exhibit in-group bias in the sense of being more...

This paper looks into the interrelation between economic growth, inequality, and poverty. Using the notion of pro-poor growth, this study examines to what extent the poor benefit from economic growth. First, various approaches to defining and measuring pro-poor growth are scrutinized using a...

Over the past 20 years, aggregate measures of global inequality have changed little even if significant structural changes have been observed. High growth rates of China and India lifted millions out of poverty, while the stagnation in many African countries caused them to fall behind. Using the...

This paper presents a model allowing one to analyze the joint determination of inequality, taxes, human capital and growth. We consider the political economy of redistribution between three income groups in a dynamic economy. The paper seeks to explain the effect of corruptibility (exemptions)...

I study the optimal taxation of robots and labor income. In the model, robots substitute for routine labor and complement non-routine labor. I show that while it is optimal to distort robot adoption, robots may be either taxed or subsidized. The robot tax exploits general-equilibrium effects to...

Many OECD countries such as the USA, the UK or Switzerland are concerned with the affordability of utility services and the distributional consequences inherent in the pricing strategy of basic goods and services, such as electricity. However, the effectiveness of the electricity tariff as a...

Individuals often hold erroneous beliefs about their socio-economic status relative to others. We develop a new machine learning technique to measure these misperceptions and use large-scale international survey data to compute status misperception for 241,757 households from 97 countries (24...