Frequent violations of fair principles in real-life settings raise the fundamental question of whether such principles can guarantee the existence of a self-enforcing equilibrium in a free economy. We show that elementary principles of distributive justice guarantee that a pure-strategy Nash...

This paper presents a politico-economic model that includes a mutual link between earnings mobility and redistributive politics. The model demonstrates that an economy attains a unique, unskilled-majority equilibrium where unskilled, lowincome agents support a low, rather than a high,...

This paper presents a politico-economic model including a mutual link between earnings mobility and redistribution policy affected by human capital risk. The model demonstrates that a low-risk economy produces multiple equilibria: an unskilled- majority equilibrium with lower mobility and higher...

This paper presents a politico-economic model that includes a mutual link between life cycle earnings mobility and redistributive politics. The model demonstrates that when an economy features a high opportunity of upward mobility and high risk of downward mobility, it attains a unique...

We present a conceptual framework for the analysis of politically feasible tax reforms. First, we prove a median voter theorem for monotonic reforms of non-linear tax systems. This yields a characterization of reforms that are preferred by a majority of individuals over the status quo and hence...

This paper begins with a survey of the literature on the political economy approaches to labor income taxation. We focus on recent progress made by examining in detail the specific properties of non-linear taxes derived in the context of voting. Next, we present new results on the existence of...

This paper studies the tax treatment of couples. We develop two different approaches. One is tailored to the analysis of tax systems that stick to the principle that the tax base for couples is the sum of their incomes. One is tailored to the analysis of reforms toward individual taxation. We...

Are reforms towards individual taxation politically feasible? Are they desirable from a welfare perspective? We develop a method to answer such questions and apply it to the US federal income tax since the 1960s. Main findings are: As of today, Pareto-improvements require a move away from joint...

Various studies provide evidence that buying of votes is a widespread instrument of parties in developing countries to influence the outcome of elections. In this paper we examine whether democratic societies which hold votes on educational enhancing redistribution proposals can escape poverty...