Inference-based stochastic dominance procedures are applied to Luxembourg Income Study data to rank ten western countries in terms of standards of living and poverty. First-order dominance comparisons ranks more than 50 percent of all pairwise comparisons and second-order (generalized Lorenz)...

Economists have long speculated that envy and malice play important roles in economic decisions. Surprisingly little empirical evidence has been offered in support of such claims. This paper uses experimental and multinomial logit techniques to estimate the effects of envy and malice in economic...

The measurement of global tax progressivity has been extensively debated over the last decade. We find that the debate stems from a failure to fully recognize the role of the average tax burden. We demonstrate that, once the effect of the average tax burden is controlled for, the two major...

The fairness of a tax change is often judged by examining its impact on tax burdens or net incomes of different income classes. Two competing definitions of tax neutrality give surprisingly different and conflicting answers to the fairness question. If the objective is to maximize welfare, the...

This article investigates the effects of distributionally neutral tax changes on equity and efficiency using computational general equilibrium and stochastic dominance techniques. The authors find, for a tax increase, that the constant-tax-share definition is preferred both in terms of...