Survey data from the United States, West Germany and East Germany are analyzed to compare individual attitudes towards political redistribution in each country. In West Germany the homo oeconomicus effect , the social rivalry effect and the public values effect simultaneously retain an...

The traditional criticism notwithstanding, we show that social mobility can, in principle, explain political income redistributions. Nonetheless, the social-mobility argument for redistribution is not satisfactory, as actual transition probabilities are not consistent with order-preserving...

The Netherlands has a unique tradition in which all major Dutch political parties provide CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis with highly detailed proposals for the tax-benefit system in every national election. This information allows us to quantitatively measure the...