This paper studies the problem of redistribution between individuals having different mortality rates. We use a continuous time model in which there are two types of individuals characterized by different survival probability paths. Individual preferences are represented by a generalized...

International institutions are recommending policies aimed at shift- ing the tax burden from labour and business incomes to less growth- detrimental forms of taxation, such as consumption taxes. However, de- spite the expected positive macroeconomic effects, a criticism about in- creasing the...

We study the extent to which people are misinformed about their relative position in the income distribution and the effects on preferences for redistribution of correcting faulty beliefs. We implement a tailor-made survey in Sweden and document that a vast majority of Swedes believe that they...

We assess the effects of U.S. tax policy reforms on inequality by applying a new decomposition method allowing us to disentangle the policy effect from changing market incomes. Over the period 1979-2007, the cumulative policy effect aggravated inequality by increasing the income share of the top...

Climate change economics mostly neglects sizeable interactions of carbon pricing with other fiscal policy instruments. Conversely, public finance typically overlooks the effects of future decarbonization efforts when devising instruments for the major goals of fiscal policy. We argue that such a...

We study a simple model of production, accumulation, and redistribution, where agents are heterogeneous in their initial wealth, and a sequence of redistributive tax rates is voted upon. Though the policy is infinite-dimensional, we prove that a median voter theorem holds if households have...

Supporters of basic income theories have an admirable goal. However, applying the economic way of thinking to the problem, we see that, while the goal is certainly laudable, the attempt to achieve that goal can lead to disastrous results stemming from knowledge and incentive problems faced by...

Energy and climate policies are usually seen as measures to internalize externalities. However, as a side effect, these policies redistribute wealth between consumers and producers, and within these groups. While redistribution is seldom the focus of the academic literature in energy economics,...

This paper examines the distributional performance of social security provisions in the form of allowances, income related deductions and tax credits. Our analysis reveals that provisions in the form of tax credits is more progressive and redistributive relative to allowances and income related...

The effects of personal income tax changes are usually analyzed by comparing the inequality of income distributions before and after the tax policy change on a fixed pretax income distribution. This constant-population methodology aims at isolating the "pure" redistributive effect of the tax...