This paper studies electoral competition in a model of redistributive politics with deterministic voting and heterogeneous voter loyalties to political parties. We construct a natural measure of party strength based on the sizes and intensities of a party's loyal voter segments and demonstrate...

We consider redistributional taxation between people with and without human capital if education is endogenous and if individuals differ in their perceptions about own ability. Those who see their ability as low like redistributive taxation because of the transfers it generates. Those who see...

Restrictions on work hours are more important in countries with a large welfare state. We show that this empirical observation is consistent with the strategic effects of such restrictions in a welfare state in the context of optimal direct taxation in the tradition of Mirrlees (1971). Our...