Showing 1 - 10 of 18
When based on perceived rather than on objective income distributions, the Meltzer-Richards hypothesis and the POUM hypothesis work quite well empirically: there exists a positive link between perceived inequality or perceived upward mobility and the extent of redistribution in democratic...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010877656
Rather than about absolute payoffs, governments in fiscal competition often seem to care about their performance relative to other governments. Moreover, they often appear to mimic policies observed elsewhere. We study such behaviour in a tax competition game with mobile capital à la...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005013050
We argue that societies with a stronger tendency towards postmaterialist life goals tilt the tax structure towards personal income taxes and away from corporate taxation. We provide empirical evidence for this correlation in OECD countries. To address endogeneity issues we then use an...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10009651860
We investigate optimal taxation of lifetime income with and without an emigration option during old age. The government sets the rates of deferred taxation and of possibly reduced taxation of interest. If agents are immobile, the optimal policy consists in full deferral of income taxes on...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10009351472
A relatively high labor-intensity in government-run entities need not imply slack in their organization. Rather, it is a rational reaction to various forms of wage tax advantage that the public sector has over private firms. Even though an unequal tax treatment of public and private sectors...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005765889
According to many observers, the world is currently getting riskier along many of its dimensions. In this paper we analyse how the welfare state, i.e., social insurance that works through redistributive taxation, should deal with this trend. We distinguish between risks that can be insured by...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005766063
Contests between groups are plagued by intra-group externalities (freeriding). Yet, costless incentive schemes that entirely avoid free-riding within a group might not be desirable, neither individually nor socially. In contests among two groups, a relatively weak (i.e., small or unproductive)...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10008498991
We interpret the Open Method of Coordination (OMC), recently adopted by the EU as a mode of governance in the area of social policy and other fields, as an imitative learning dynamics of the type considered in evolutionary game theory. The best-practise feature and the iterative design of the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005000398
Social values shape policy outcomes. We examine the role of postmaterialism, a widely used concept in the social sciences, for the mix of capital and labour taxation chosen by a society. Following political scientist Inglehart, we define the degree of postmaterialism as the relative importance...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005094501
We propose a dynamic general equilibrium model with human capital accumulation to evaluate the economic consequences of compulsory services (such as military draft or social services). Our analysis identifies a so far ignored dynamic cost arising from distortions in time allocation over the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005181268