Wealthier households obtain higher returns on their investments than poorer ones. How should the tax system account for this return inequality? I study capital taxation in an economy in which return rates endogenously correlate with wealth. The leading example is a financial market, where the...

We apply non-linear error-correction models to the empirical testing of the sustainability of the government's intertemporal budget constraint. Our empirical analysis, based on Italy, shows that the Italian government is meeting its intertemporal budget constraint, in spite of the high levels of...

This paper investigates the impact of fiscal policy on profits using panel data for 19 high-income OECD countries during the period 1975-1999. We estimate a profit equation in which profits depend on a set of fiscal variables. Our empirical method is based on a consistent treatment of the...

Rising government debt levels around the world are raising the specter that authorities might seek to inflate away the debt. In theoretical settings where fiscal policy “dominates” monetary policy, higher debt without offsetting changes in primary surpluses should lead households to...

The relationship between inequality and redistribution is usually studied under the assumption that the government collects different amounts of taxes from each citizen (voter) but gives back the same amount (in cash or in kind) to everyone. In this paper we consider what happens if the...

This paper investigates the impact of emigration on the political choice regarding the size of the welfare state. Mobility has two countervailing effects: the political participation effect and the tax base effect. With emigration, the composition of the constituency changes. This increases the...

We explore the relation between social political identity and prosociality. We first construct a theoretical model to generate predictions for the behavior of players in an ultimatum game who are influenced by social political identity. Then we use a novel subject pool-registered members of...

Income equality and trust seem to go along with several other ingredients of social capital as determinants of economic growth across the globe. In a large sample of countries, equality in the distribution of income as measured by the World Bank and by The Standardized World Income Inequality...

The social cost of carbon is the central economic measure for aggregate climate change damages and functions as a metric for optimal carbon prices. Previous literature shows that inequality significantly influences the level of the social cost of carbon, but mostly neglects a major source of...

In most OECD countries, pension reform policy has decreased the level of intragenerational redistribution over the last three decades, that is, redistribution among members of the same generation with high and low pension entitlements. This trend has occurred despite heterogeneity in life...