When are high earnings considered a legitimate target for redistribution, and when not? We design a real-effort laboratory experiment in which we manipulate the assignment of payrates (societal ‘reward rules') that translate performance on a real-effort counting task into pre-tax earnings. We...

This study analyzes whether enabling people to get informed about redistributive consequences is an effective measure to prevent equivalence framing in the domain of voting on redistribution. Utilizing a simplified version of the Meltzer-Richard model, an equivalent frame is induced by letting...

Households and social policies both serve as vehicles of lifecycle financing through intergenerational transfers, with working-age people as net contributors and children and the elderly as beneficiaries. However, there is a marked socialization asymmetry. Working-age people pay taxes and social...

This article thematically reviews two leading schools of economic thought on efficiency in democracy. The author pits collective action and public goods-based approaches in the tradition of Mancur Olson (1965, 2000) against Chicago-influenced theses by Posner, Stigler, Breton, Wittman and...