Bismarckian social security systems are associated with larger public pension expenditures, a smaller fraction of private pension and lower income inequality than Beveridgean systems. This paper introduces a bidimensional voting model to account for all these features. Agents differ in age,...

This article analyses the redistributive efficiency of public spending and taxation in a panel of both advanced and developing economies during the last three decades (1984-2012). In order to explore how redistribution is achieved through fiscal policies, a two-stage approach is applied. First,...

The welfare state is generally viewed as either providing redistribution from rich to poor or as providing publicly-financed insurance. Both views are incomplete. Welfare policies provide both insurance and redistribution in varying amounts, depending on the design of the policy. We explore the...

Under adverse selection, redlining of borrowers may occur when their wealth is not sufficient to reach the collateral needed by creditors to separate types. In this paper, potential entrepreneurs can join in a peer group and voluntarily decide to collect and redistribute their endowments. If the...

Taxes and transfers reduce inequality in disposable income relative to market income. The effect varies, however, across OECD countries. The redistributive impact of taxes and transfers depends on the size, mix and the progressivity of each component. Some countries with a relatively small tax...

Political economics predicts that the rich oppose redistribution and vote for conservative parties. Although this seemingly fits the data well in most countries, I show that the relationship breaks down when we control for unobservable characteristics. Using Norwegian survey data, I study to...

The effects of the economic crisis on the public sector deficit and the new demographic and social scenarios that have emerged have placed the welfare state at the core of the debate on reforms in the public sector. This article analyses the current situation as regards social spending in Spain,...

Departing from mainstream economics, surveys …rst show that individuals do care about fairness in their demand for redistribution. They also show that the cultural environment in which individuals grow up a¤ects heir preferences about redistribution. Including these two components of the...

We assess the effects of U.S. tax policy reforms on inequality by applying a new decomposition method that allows us to disentangle the direct policy effect from the effect of changing market incomes. Over the whole period 1979-2007 the cumulative tax policy effect aggravated income inequality...

Taxes and transfers can have significant impacts on poverty and inequality. All standard measures are by definition anonymous in the sense that we do not know the identity of winners and losers. That a given combination of taxes and transfers makes some of the poor poorer, however, may be...