This paper provides a rationale for the revival of protectionism, based on the rise of the educated class. In a trade model with heterogeneous workers and entrepreneurs, globalization generates aggregate gains but has distributional effects, which can be attenuated through taxation. By playing a...

We study the effect of franchise extension on the fiscal structure of central and local governments in the United Kingdom between 1820 and 1913 to revisit the Redistribution Hypothesis - the prediction that franchise extension causes an increase in state-sponsored redistribution. We adopt a...

We explain the public's support for the minimum wage (MW) institution despite economists' warnings that the MW is a "blunt instrument" for redistribution. To do so we build a model in which workers are heterogeneous in ability, and the government engages in redistribution through the public...

One major argument to legitimize the transfer system in European club football is that transfer fees paid by hiring clubs result in a redistribution of revenues from large market to small market clubs, which may lead to more intense on-field competition. We investigate this claim using a unique...

The purpose of this article is to integrate the class of preferences developed by Gul and Pesendorfer into the theory of optimal redistributive taxation with heterogenous consumers and asymmetric information. The consumers are inclined to over-spend on a commodity for which they experience...

Previous sociological research has overlooked the fact that a welfare state’s tax system does not solely redistribute from rich to poor (vertical) but also between family types (horizontal). Different types of families are treated differently due to (de-)familialization policies in the tax...

In this paper, we investigate the role of unequal opportunities and social group membership in preferences for redistribution. We present results from a large-scale online experiment with more than 4,000 participants. The experiment features a real-effort task and a subsequent dictator game with...

We analyse a model in which families may either be “traditional” single-earner with caring for the child at home or “modern” double-earner households using market child care. Family policies may favour either the one or the other group, like market care subsidies vs. cash for care....

The authors analyze to what extent and how the tax burden should be shifted towards top income earners in order to reduce income inequality. Starting from Lambert and Aronson (Inequality decomposition analysis and the Gini coefficient revisited 1993) and Alvaredo (A note on the relationship...

Forty-two percent of Americans give different answers when asked, respectively, about the reasons for being rich and the reasons for being poor. We develop and test a theo-ry about support for redistribution in the presence of target-specific beliefs about the causes of low and high incomes. Our...

Individuals vary considerably in how much they earn during their lifetimes. We study how the tax-and-transfer system o sets inequalities in lifetime earnings, which would otherwise translate into differences in living standards. Based on a life-cycle model, we find that redistribution by taxes...

The authors analyze to what extent and how the tax burden should be shifted towards top income earners in order to reduce income inequality. Starting from Lambert and Aronson (Inequality decomposition analysis and the Gini coefficient revisited 1993) and Alvaredo (A note on the relationship...

This paper analyzes the redistributive channel of a money financed fiscal stimulus (MFFS). It shows that the way in which this regime is implemented is crucial to determine its redistributive effects and consequently its effectiveness. In normal times, the most effective regime is a MFFS with no...

This study assesses the redistributive impacts of fiscal instruments in a 2014 Mexican household budget survey (ENIGH) correcting for potential top-income measurement problems. We use two correction methods based on within-survey information to re-estimate the redistributive impacts of...

A society that believes wealth to be determined by random "luck", rather than by merit, demands more redistribution. We present evidence of this behavior by exploiting a natural experiment provided by the L'Aquila earthquake in 2009, which hit a large area of Central Italy through a series of...

This paper presents an analysis of the recent evolution of social assistance in the developing world, looking at its complex typological configuration, which has interlinked with, and partly reflects the complex demographic and epidemiological transitions and rapid urbanization and economic...

Over the last two decades a growing interest in understanding what determines the redistributive role of tax-benefit systems has emerged worldwide. In the case of Italy, previous analyses were mainly focused on quantifying the contribution of marginal tax rates, deductions and tax credits to the...

Combining an intensive labor supply margin with an extensive, productivity-enhancing migration margin, we determine how regional inequality and labor mobility shape optimal redistribution. We propose the use of delayed optimal-control techniques to obtain optimal tax formulae with...

Expansion of the public sector and redistributive policies may reduce income inequality, but formal tests suffer from the problem of endogeneity of government size with respect to the distribution of income. Studying 30 European countries over the period 2004-2015, we apply instrumental variable...

The 2010 Economic Adjustment Programme initiated a period of strict international supervision with respect to tax policy in Greece. The country implemented a large-scale fiscal consolidation package, aiming to reduce its public deficit below 3% of GDP by 2016. Since the beginning of the crisis,...

An issue of interest in the literature that explores the drivers of inequality is the distributional bearing of tax and transfer policy, where an important theme concerns changes in the relative treatment of alternative population subgroups. We develop an empirical approach for quantifying the...

This paper presents baseline results from the latest version of EUROMOD (version I1.0+), the tax-benefit microsimulation model for the EU. First, we briefly report the process of updating EUROMOD. We then present indicators for income inequality and risk of poverty using EUROMOD and discuss the...

This papers quantifies the redistributive effects on progressivity, poverty and welfare, that would occur if the monetary benefits currently in place in the Spanish system were to be replaced by a neutral alternative in terms of spending, granting a universal basic income (UBI) to everyone. We...

Lupu and Pontusson (2011) argue that the structure of income inequality, rather than its level, can explain differences in fiscal redistribution across modern welfare states. Contrary to the assertion that there is robust evidence in support of this proposition, the present paper challenges the...

In most situations of voluntary contribution people are willing to give at the beginning, however contribution rates decay over time. In a new setup we introduce non-enforceable sharing rules, as requests, in a repeated redistribution game (called tip pooling). Three experimental treatments...

The 2010 Economic Adjustment Programme initiated a period of strict international supervision with respect to tax policy in Greece. The country implemented a large-scale fiscal consolidation package, aiming to reduce its public deficit below 3% of GDP by 2016. Since the beginning of the crisis,...

Globalization and automation have brought about a tremendous increase in productivity, with enormous benefits, but also a dramatic reallocation of jobs, skills, and incomes, which might jeopardize the full realization of those benefits. Current social policies may not be adequate to successfully...

Using SAMOD, a tax-benefit microsimulation model for South Africa, this paper examines the joint distributional impact of the increase in the value-added tax (VAT) rate and increases in benefit amounts in 2018. Although poverty and inequality did not increase overall, the poorest still saw a...

The traditional normative literature on fiscal federalism argues that redistributive policies should be centralized in order to avoid welfare- or tax-induced migration. However, recent evidence shows that even in a setup where the progressivity of the income tax schedule is centralized to an...

One's willingness to accept an outcome or even to correct it depends on whether or not the underlying procedure is deemed legitimate. We manipulate the role allocation procedure in the dictator game to illustrate that this belief is not independent of the outcome and is self-serving in its...

This paper explores whether redistributive politics can explain differences in agricultural subsidies in Russia, a country whose autocratic regime represents a fertile ground for strategic redistribution. Relying on political economy literature, we examine the strategies regional and federal...

What do the wealthiest groups in society think about tax payment? What is their view of the role of the state? How do these perceptions influence the ways in which the government collects taxes and provides social spending? This paper addresses these questions focusing on the case of Chile....

This paper explores the distributional impact of lowering the value-added tax rate for standard-rated items in Tanzania Mainland. Using a static tax-benefit microsimulation model- TAZMOD-which is underpinned by data derived from the Household Budget Survey 2017/18, reductions in value-added...

We examine empirically the relationship between the extent of redistribution and the components of the Mirrlees framework, with a focus on inherent inequality and government’s redistributive preferences. We have constructed our income distribution variables from the Luxembourg Income Study...

Although regional resources have been shown to influence secessionist conflicts in developing countries, their effect in established democracies has largely been neglected. We integrate regional resource value and inter-regional transfers in a model on the optimal size of nations, and show that...

This paper analyzes the impact of fiscal federalism on income inequality and redistribution. Theoretically contradicting arguments ask for empirical evidence to obtain a better knowledge of this relationship. We rely on the institutional setting in Switzerland to study the issue empirically....

European countries have the world's most redistributive tax and transfer systems. While they have been well equipped to deal with vertical inequality - that is, fostering redistribution from the rich to the poor - less is known about their performance in dealing with horizontal inequality, that...

The Tiebout hypothesis suggests that people who migrate from more to less redistributive countries are more negative towards redistribution than non-migrants. However, differences between migrants' and non-migrants' redistributive preferences might also reflect self-interest. We present a model...

Expansion of the public sector and redistributive policies may reduce income inequality, but formal tests suffer from the problem of endogeneity of government size with respect to the distribution of income. Studying 30 European countries over the period 2004-2015, we apply instrumental variable...