The effect of taxes and benefits on the poor is usually measured using standard poverty and inequality indicators, stochastic dominance tests, and measures of progressivity and horizontal inequity. However, these measures can fail to capture an important aspect: that some of the poor are made...

Taxes and transfers can have significant impacts on poverty and inequality. All standard measures are by definition anonymous in the sense that we do not know the identity of winners and losers. That a given combination of taxes and transfers makes some of the poor poorer, however, may be...