Over the last decades, the United States has experienced a large increase in, both, income inequality and living standards. The workhorse models of optimal income taxation call for more redistribution as inequality rises. By contrast, living standards play no role for taxes and transfers in...

A model of endogenous growth is presented, based on productive public expenditures, and featuring some degree of income inequality, and polarization in policy preferences. The main innovation lays in the political process determining capital taxation that relies, both on voting and on "influence...

Latin America is widely acknowledged as one of the most unequal regions of the world (Sánchez-Ancochea 2021). But it is also one of the most democratic, certainly as compared to other developing regions. These two facts seem difficult to reconcile. Both folk theories of democratic...

We use cross-sectional data from 93 countries to study the relationship between how much redistribution citizens of different socioeconomic status want and how much the government actually redistributes. We focus on redistribution because it is an outcome for which there is a natural class...

Die Ampelkoalition steht nach einem Regierungsjahr vor großen Herausforderungen. Der Krieg in der Ukraine und die steigenden Preise insbesondere im Bereich der Energie machen den Deutschen Sorgen und sie erwarten unterstützende Maßnahmen des Staates. Eine empirische Analyse der Forderungen...

Inequality in political participation and influence has strongly increased in recent decades. In this paper, we focus on three aspects of political inequality: the increasing concentration of both political and charitable donations, the growing gap in descriptive representation, and the...

The last decade has seen a sharp increase in interest in the possible existence of a Paradox of Redistribution (PoR) whereby narrow targeting of social transfers aimed at increasing their redistributive (poverty) impact has the perverse effect of increasing poverty over the medium term due to...

We re-analyze the major explanations of redistribution including the Meltzer-Richard (MR) model, power resources theory (PRT), the Iversen-Soskice political institutions explanation, Lupu and Ponstusson's wage inequality skew, along with works suggesting other causes, such as immigration. The...

Die lateinamerikanischen Gesellschaften sind historisch von einer obszönen Ungleichheit geprägt und werden immer wieder von schweren Finanzkrisen erschüttert. Am Beispiel Argentiniens geht das Buch den systematischen Gründen für den Verzicht auf eine gezielte Besteuerung von Reichtum durch...

Using cross-sectional data from 93 countries, we investigate the relationship between the desired level of redistribution among citizens from different socioeconomic backgrounds and the actual extent of government redistribution. Our focus on redistribution arises from the inherent class...

The public acceptability of a carbon price depends on how the revenues from carbon pricing are used. In a fully incentivised experiment with a large representative sample of the German population, we compare five different revenue recycling schemes and show that support for a carbon price is...

Policymakers, public commentators, and researchers often cite the Nordic countries as examples of a social and economic model that successfully combines low income inequality with prosperity and growth. This article aims to critically assess this claim by integrating theoretical perspectives and...

Joseph E. Stiglitz has had a remarkable career. He is a brilliant academic, capped by sharing the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics and the Nobel Peace Prize, and honorary degrees from Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford and more than fifty other universities, and elected not only to the National Academy...

Populist regimes manage to dismantle checks and balances on the executive with the help of popular support. What does a distributive politics model predicts under a populist regime? In this paper I use a particular setting: The (very) first election of former Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa...

How does inclusion in social policy programs strengthen individuals' support for subsequent redistribution? Existing work often conflates the effects of policy inclusion with the concrete material benefits they provide and broader contextual factors, such as economic shocks and long-running...

Increasing inequality and associated egalitarian sentiments have again put redistribution on the political agenda. Other-regarding preferences may also affect support for redistribution, but knowledge about their distribution in the broader population and how they are associated with political...

Increasing inequality and associated egalitarian sentiments have again put redistribution on the political agenda. Other-regarding preferences may also affect support for redistribution, but knowledge about their distribution in the broader population and how they are associated with political...

This study examines whether socially disadvantaged ethnic groups practise favouritism when they reach national power. We use the case of Bolivia, where Evo Morales, a member of the traditionally disadvantaged Indigenous Aymara, became the first Indigenous president in 2005. We develop a...

This study examines whether socially disadvantaged ethnic groups practise favouritism when they reach national power. We use the case of Bolivia, where Evo Morales, a member of the traditionally disadvantaged Indigenous Aymara, became the first Indigenous president in 2005. We develop a...

Increasing inequality and associated egalitarian sentiments have again put redistribution on the political agenda. Other-regarding preferences may also affect support for redistribution, but knowledge about their distribution in the broader population and how they are associated with political...

Education and income are strong predictors of health and longevity. In the last 20 years many efforts have been made to understand if these relationships are causal and what the possible role of policy should be as a result. The evidence from various studies is ambiguous: the effects of...

This paper studies the impact of distributional policies on social cohesion. The focus is on South Africa, a country with the highest unemployment rate worldwide and a major destination hub for the forcibly displaced. The paper uses a regression discontinuity design based on the eligibility rule...

Increasing inequality and associated egalitarian sentiments have again put redistribution on the political agenda. Other-regarding preferences may also affect support for redistribution, but knowledge about their distribution in the broader population and how they are associated with political...

I describe a structural method to quantify the contribution of different elements of social choice to the level of redistribution. Estimating a DSGE model with microdata on the support for redistribution, I find that if voters disregarded their ideological views on welfare policies,...

We offer a new explanation for why taxes have become less redistributive in many countries in parallel with an increase in income concentration. When performance-based contracts are needed to incentivize effort, redistribution through progressive income taxes becomes less precisely targeted....

Most populist regimes in Latin American countries used trade policy to redistribute income, despite being less efficient than other redistribution schemes such as transfers financed with an income tax. Often, this outcome is attributed to the lack of fiscal capacity in Latin American countries....

What are the most efficient means of redistribution in an unequal economy? We answer this question by characterizing the optimal shape of non-linear income and wealth taxes in a dynamic general equilibrium model with uninsurable idiosyncratic risk. Our analysis reproduces the distribution of...

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a pronounced setback in the fight against global poverty-likely the largest setback since World War II. Many low- and middle-income countries have yet to see a full recovery. High indebtedness in many countries has hindered a swift recovery, while rising food and...