This chapter reviews the theory of the voluntary public and private redistribution of wealth elaborated by economic analysis in the last forty years or so. The central object of the theory is altruistic gift-giving, construed as benevolent voluntary redistribution of income or wealth. The theory...

Lea Immel prepared this study while she was working at the Research Group Taxation and Fiscal Policy at the ifo Institute. The study was completed in September 2020 and accepted as doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It consists of four distinct empirical...

This paper conducts micro-simulations to study the distributional effects of several tax measures in Japan, considering households’ heterogeneity in terms of both income and wealth. Simulation results suggest that increasing the consumption tax rate and strengthening the recurrent tax on...

Immigration may affect income inequality not only by changing factor prices but also by inducing policy makers to adjust the prevailing income tax system. We assess the relative importance of these economic and political channels using administrative data from Switzerland where local authorities...

Immigration may affect income inequality not only by changing factor prices but also by inducing policy makers to adjust the prevailing income tax system. We assess the relative importance of these economic and political channels using administrative data from Switzerland where local authorities...

This paper explores the nexus between the phenomenon of increasing income inequality and redistributive effects of the public sector. In an empirical analysis of seven OECD countries the redistributive effect will be examined by measuring the difference between inequality of market incomes and...

Specialized theoretical and empirical research should in principle be embedded in a unified framework that identifies the relevant interactions among different phenomena, enables an appropriate matching of policy instruments to objectives, and grounds normative analysis in individuals' utilities...

This paper examines how perceptions of social mobility affect acceptance of inequality. We conduct a randomized information intervention in a large and heterogeneous sample of Germans to manipulate beliefs about social mobility. While the information treatment renders social mobility perceptions...

This paper examines how perceived importance of family background affect distributional pref-erences using two large-scale survey experiments. In the first experiment, we randomly inform respondents about the relationship between parental income and economic success later in life, which renders...

Entitlement programs have become an increasing component of total government spending in the US over the last six decades. To some observers, this growth of the welfare state is excessive and unwarranted. To others, it is a welcome counter-acting force to the rapid increase in income inequality....