Do income taxes levied at a state or regional level affect the after-tax distribution of income? Or do workers merely move between regions, causing pre-tax wages to adjust? This question is relevant both in across states in the United States, and across countries within the European Union. Using...

We derive conditions of individual preferences and technology that give rise to a negative correlation between income inequality and environmental protection. We present a class of models (which captures a static model as well as an overlapping-generations model) in which individuals differ in...

A common critique of most measures of income inequality, which are based on a single year's income, is that they fail to take account of income mobility. If income fluctuations are large, and individuals can smooth consumption, then high inequality and high mobility may be no worse than low...

Societies typically have three objectives for work and welfare: sustained income/economic growth per capita, employment growth (and job security?), a just distribution of income along with access to certain basic services. There may be tensions between these objectives. This paper tries to...

Prior to the last three decades, regular surveys on household income were rare or non-existent in many developed countries, making it difficult for economists to develop long-run series on income distribution. Using taxation statistics, which tend to be available over a longer time span, I...

In this article we quantify the aggregate, distributional and welfare consequences of two revenue neutral flat-tax reforms using a model economy that replicates the U.S. distributions of earnings, income and wealth in very much detail. We find that the less progressive reform brings about a 2.4%...

The available empirical evidence indicates that the distribution of private income in Australia is polarising. While there are a number of factors underlying this trend, it is clear that the dramatic swing to "economic rationalist" policies since the mid 1980s has been a major cause of the...

If redistribution is distortionary, and if the income of skilled workers is due to knowledge-intensive activities and depends positively on intellectual property, a social planner which cares about income distribution may in principle want to use a reduction in Intellectual Property Rights...