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Supporters of left-wing parties typically place more emphasis on redistributive policies than right-wing voters. I investigate whether this difference in tolerating inequality is amplified by suspicious success - achievements that may arise from cheating. Using a laboratory experiment, I...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011899249
We solve the problem of a social planner who seeks to minimize inequality via transfers with a fixed public budget in a distribution of exogenously given incomes. The appropriate solution method depends on the objective function: If it is convex, as in the case of the absolute mean deviation, it...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011513031
life-cycle model, we find that redistribution by taxes and transfers off sets 54% of the inequality in lifetime earnings …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012108653
Constructing measures of post-tax income inequality that are consistent with national accounts requires the allocation of the entirety of government expenditure to individuals. About half of government expenditure in the United States takes the form of in-kind collective expenditure (e.g.,...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012816827
Individuals vary considerably in how much they earn during their lifetimes. This study examines the role of the tax-and-transfer system in mitigating such inequalities, which could otherwise lead to disparities in living standards. Utilizing a life-cycle model, we determine that taxes and...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014427523
We compile biographical information on more than 5,000 Prussian politicians and exploit newly digitized administrative data to examine whether landowning and landless elites differ in the extent to which they support health infrastructure projects. Using exogenous variation in soil texture, we...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012314808
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014465211
A common assumption in the optimal taxation literature is that the social planner maximizes a welfarist social welfare function with weights decreasing with income. However, high transfer withdrawal rates in many countries imply very low weights for the working poor in practice. We reconcile...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011721431
This study uses German social security records to provide novel evidence about the heterogeneity in life expectancy by lifetime earnings and, additionally, documents the distributional implications of this earnings-related heterogeneity. We find a strong association between lifetime earnings and...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011740362
for redistribution. We leverage a quasi-experiment in Finland, where every year on the so-called tax day, the authorities … earnings of the top 10% are unfair, but that public support for redistribution remains largely unaffected. A notable exception … are top earners, who decrease their support for redistribution, and young people, who increase their support for …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014229860