This paper examines the impact of the introduction of the value-added tax on inequality and government revenues using newly released macro data. We present both conventional county fixed effect regressions and instrumental variable analyses, where VAT adoption is instrumented using the previous...

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...

This paper examines the effects of a unilateral reform of the redistribution policy in an economy open to international trade. We set up a general equilibrium trade model with heterogeneous agents allowing for country asymmetries. We show that under international trade compared to autarky, a...

We study the effects of corporate taxes on income inequality. Using state corporate taxes as a setting, we provide evidence that corporate tax cuts lead to increases in income inequality. This result is robust across regression, matching, and synthetic controls approaches, and to controlling for...

We provide an interesting empirical evidence dealing with the cross country data on equality i.e. movements of Gini coefficient over last four decades. This seems to suggest a robust empirical evidence that the growth or change in inequality across nations has a negative relation with initial...

Our goal is to examine the income inequality and welfare effects of the direct distribution of resource rents and subsequent taxation in Iran. We use rich micro survey data covering more than 36,000 Iranian households in 2009. Our micro-simulations show that the direct distribution of resource...

This paper studies the heterogeneity of the marginal propensity to consume out of wealth based on French household surveys. This heterogeneity is driven by differences in both wealth composition and wealth levels. We find a decreasing marginal propensity to consume out of wealth across the...