We examine the relationship between immigration and attitudes toward redistribution using a newly assembled data set of immigrant stocks for 140 regions of 16 Western European countries. Exploiting within-country variations in the share of immigrants at the regional level, we find that native...

Different beliefs about how fair social competition is and what determines income inequality, influence the redistributive policy chosen democratically in a society. But the composition of income in the first place depends on equilibrium tax policies. If a society believes that individual effort...

Various authors, notably Eaton and Rosen (1980a) and Varian (1980), have proposed that income taxation may be justified to some extent on the ground that it serves as social insurance against uncertainties in labor income. They assume that private insurance is unavailable. primarily because of...

A substantial literature addresses the design of transfer programs and policies, including the negative income tax, other means-tested transfers, the earned income tax credit, categorical assistance, and work inducements. This work is largely independent of that on the optimal nonlinear income...

We study loss aversion in majority voting. First, we show a status quo bias. Second, loss aversion implies a moderating effect. Third, in a dynamic setting, the effect of loss aversion diminishes with the length of the planning horizon of voters; however, in the presence of a projection bias,...

Should legal rules be chosen only on the basis of their efficiency or also on the basis of their distributional effects? This article demonstrates that redistribution accomplished through legal rules is systematically less efficient than redistribution accomplished through the income tax system...

The federal income tax and major welfare programs do not take into account significant cost-of-living variations among regions. This article considers what adjustments might be appropriate in light of the distributive purposes of tax and welfare systems and concerns about the efficiency of the...

Ideas about what is "fair" above and beyond the individual's position in the income ladder influence preferences for redistribution. We study the dynamic evolution of different economies in which redistributive policies, perceptions of fairness, inequality and growth are jointly determined. We...

This paper considers the optimal tax treatment of voluntary transfers to individuals in a" framework that integrates redistributive income taxation and estate and gift taxation. Under this" formulation, redistributive considerations become secondary. The optimal tax treatment of" transfers...

This article addresses conceptual issues concerning the distributive incidence of public goods. Solutions depend on the specific purposes for asking the question of distributive incidence notably, assessing the extent to which various public goods should be provided, determining how the...