The central purpose of this paper is to introduce a new political economy explanation to modern Social Security Systems. This approach is based on the Single-Mindedness Theory (SMT), which assumes that the more single-minded groups are able to exert a greater power of influence on Governments...

The current British Government's "Big Society" plan is based on the idea that granting more freedom to local communities and volunteers will compensate for a withdrawal of public agencies and spending. This idea is grounded on a widely held belief about the relationship between government and...

The aim of this paper is to explore the motivation of monetary transfers received by household heads. Indeed, the financial transfers may be motivated by altruism or by the expectation of future services. For this reason, we select a sample of Italian families from the 2006 European Union...

Using a quasi-experimental design, I show that self-reported information requirements are effective at reducing evasion. I use a reform that simplified the reporting rules for tax deductions of noncash charitable contributions in the U.S. to show that weaker reporting requirements led to a large...

This paper examines the behavioral response of households to wealth transfer taxation using household survey data from Japan. The data reveal that relatively few households plan to reallocate the newly taxable amount of wealth to their own consumption or inter vivos transfers in response to the...

We examine how taxes impact charitable giving and how this relationship is affected by the degree of wasteful government spending. In our model, individuals make donations to charities knowing that the government collects a flat-rate tax on income (net of charitable donations) and redistributes...

In this paper I will introduce a new political economy model, where there exists a competition amongst two political candidates, which aim to set a policy which enables them to win elections, max- imising the probability of winning. I will show that, if taxes neces- sary to repay the debt are...

We examine how taxes impact giving to charity and how this relationship is affected by the degree of wasteful government spending. In our model, government collects a flat-rate tax on income net of charitable donations and redistributes part of the tax revenue. The rest of the tax revenue is...

We examine the implications of different redistribution policy reforms in Morocco, considering taxation, and based on a dynamic general equilibrium model of three agents: households, firms and Ricardian government. Consequently, a policy that supports public investment guarantees significant...

This paper applies the methods of Gruber and Saez (2002) to a panel of tax returns spanning 1979 through 2001 in order to examine the sensitivity of the elasticities of taxable and broad income to an array of factors. The paper finds that that Gruber and Saez’s approach yields an estimated...