We discuss the effect of formal political institutions (electoral systems, fiscal decentralization, presidential and parliamentary regimes) on the extent and direction of income (re-) distribution. Empirical evidence is presented for a large sample of 70 economies and a panel of 13 OECD...

We present a new data set we built based on Swiss rich lists going back to 1989. We show, among other things, that 60% of the super-rich are heirs—a fraction twice as large as in the US—and that wealth mobility at the very top has declined significantly. We find that top 0.01% wealth shares...

We collect, digitize, and supplement the Swiss rich list for the years 1989–2020 published in the "BILANZ" business magazine to gain new insights on the structure and dynamics of top wealth in Switzerland. Using this data allows us study the super-rich in Switzerland in ways that were not...

We link survey data containing Danish people’s perceptions of where they rank in various reference groups and fairness views with administrative records on their income history, life events, and reference groups. People know their income positions well, but believe others are closer to...

Imperfect altruism between generations may lead to insufficient capital accumulation. We study the welfare consequences of taxing the rent on a fixed production factor, such as land, in this setting. We prove that taxing the rent is welfare-enhancing as it increases capital investment. This...

This paper discusses techniques for measuring the incidence of carbon taxes across different household income groups and provides some cross-country estimates of these effects for selected advanced countries. The general message of this paper is that distributional concerns should not...

This paper estimates the pass through of VAT changes to consumer prices, using a unique dataset providing disaggregated, monthly data on prices and VAT rates for 17 Eurozone countries over 1999-2013. Pass through is much less than full on average, and differs markedly across types of VAT change....

We analyze the incidence and welfare effects of unit sales taxes in experimental monopoly and Bertrand markets. We find, in line with economic theory, that firms with no market power are able to shift a high share of a tax burden on to consumers, independent of whether buyers are automated or...

We study the incidence and the optimal design of nonlinear income taxes in a Mirrleesian economy with a continuum of endogenous wages. We characterize analytically the incidence of any tax reform by showing that one can mathematically formalize this problem as an integral equation. For a CES...

Digital media goods and digital media platforms exhibit cost structures and network effects that imply that price and quantity effects of consumption taxes are qualitatively different compared to what we typically find for physical goods. For instance, in most European countries and US states,...