We discuss the effect of formal political institutions (electoral systems, fiscal decentralization, presidential and parliamentary regimes) on the extent and direction of income (re-) distribution. Empirical evidence is presented for a large sample of 70 economies and a panel of 13 OECD...

We present a new data set we built based on Swiss rich lists going back to 1989. We show, among other things, that 60% of the super-rich are heirs-a fraction twice as large as in the US-and that wealth mobility at the very top has declined significantly. We find that top 0.01% wealth shares are...

We link survey data containing Danish people’s perceptions of where they rank in various reference groups and fairness views with administrative records on their income history, life events, and reference groups. People know their income positions well, but believe others are closer to...

We collect, digitize, and supplement the Swiss rich list for the years 1989-2020 published in the "BILANZ" business magazine to gain new insights on the structure and dynamics of top wealth in Switzerland. Using this data allows us study the super-rich in Switzerland in ways that were not...

We study the incidence and the optimal design of nonlinear income taxes in a Mirrleesian economy with a continuum of endogenous wages. We characterize analytically the incidence of any tax reform by showing that one can mathematically formalize this problem as an integral equation. For a CES...

We consider an unhealthy good, such as a sugar-sweetened beverage, the health damages of which are misperceived by consumers. The sugar content is endogenous. We first study the solution under "pseudo" perfect competition. In that case a simple Pigouvian tax levied per unit of output but...

We investigate the displacement effects of phase-out-of-coal policies in a stylized model of electricity generation and CO2 regulation, in which a group of countries operates an emissions trading scheme (ETS). Electricity markets are either international or national and the emissions cap remains...

We study the pass-through of indirect taxes on beer prices in the European Union (EU). Exploiting the variation of value added tax rates, beer excise tax rates, and beer prices in a panel of monthly data from 1996 to 2016 of all current 28 EU member states, we estimate the tax pass-through of...

Tax enforcement can be prohibitively costly when market transactions and participants are difficult to observe. Evasion among market participants may reduce tax revenue and provide certain types of suppliers an undue competitive advantage. Whether efforts to fully enforce taxes are worthwhile...

This paper deals with the efficiency and distributional consequences of a switch from the current German income and corporate tax system to one special variant of an intertemporally neutral tax, an extended ACE (allowance for corporate equity) corporation tax. This tax is favoured by the IFS...