This article provides empirical estimates of the redistributive impact of U.S. personal income tax over the period 1979-1990. The estimates are based on tax return data compiled from the Ernst and Young/University of Michigan tax research database. The authors employ the Gini coefficient...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationships between measures of ethnic and religious heterogeneity on the one hand and measures of inequality and redistribution on the other, using state-level US data. Design/methodology/approach – The relationship between...

In this study, the authors derive measures of the redistributive effect of taxes and welfare expenditures for the United States using Current Population Survey data for the years 1994, 1999, and 2004. The authors find that while income inequality increased, the redistributive effect of taxes and...

Is it better to have a national income tax or a set of income taxes, different in the different regions? In this article, the authors conduct marginal analysis to determine dominance conditions on the configuration of income distributions in the regions under which small and related new regional...

There is an inconsistency between the way income tax progressivity is measured and the policy instruments typically used by the income tax authorities. This inconsistency leads to violation of Feldstein´s principle of horizontal equity and causes unintentional reranking among families of...

The decomposition of the Gini-based index of redistributive effect of an income tax into vertical, horizontal, and reranking contributions according to the model of Aronson, Johnson, and Lambert (AJL) is revisited. When close equals groups are used, rather than the exact equals groups on which...

We model the optimal control of inequality for an economy experiencing growth in the mean and variance of the income distribution under conditions of uncertainty. Given quadratic losses in the level of inequality and the strength of the policy instrument, we derive a closed form solution for the...

Household needs must be taken into account when designing an equitable income tax. In this article, the authors are concerned with the use of equivalence scales to achieve horizontal equity. Equivalence scales may be relative or absolute, constant or income-varying. If the equivalence scale is...