Traditional analyses of redistributive effects of the tax-benefit system are rooted in the concepts of relative income inequality and proportionality. This observation also applies to decompositions proposed by Kakwani (1977, 1984) and Lambert (1985) that reveal the vertical and horizontal...

Theoretical discussion on compensating mechanisms involving the Pareto criterion that address inequality rather than absolute welfare is non-existent in trade literature. In a simple HOS model we consider tax-transfer policies that keep the pre-trade degree of inequality unchanged between...

The mortgage interest deduction is often criticized for contributing to after-tax income inequality. Yet the effects of the mortgage interest deduction on income inequality are more nuanced than the conventional wisdom would suggest. We show that the mortgage interest deduction causes...

This paper makes a new attack on the old problem of measuring horizontal inequity (HI). A local measure of HI is proposed, and aggregated into a global index. Whilst other approaches have captured the welfare gain which would come from eliminating HI revenue-neutrally, our global index provides...

This paper makes a new attack on the old problem of measuring horizontal inequity (HI). A local measure of HI is proposed, and aggregated into a global index. Whilst other approaches have captured the welfare gain which would come from eliminating HI revenue-neutrally, our global index provides...

A local measure of classical horizontal inequity (HI) in an income tax or tax-benefit system is proposed and aggregated into a global index. This index expresses the revenue gain per capita that would come from eliminating HI welfare-neutrally, and also reveals the loss of vertical performance,...

Choice defaults are an increasingly popular public policy tool. Yet there is little knowledge of the distributional consequences of such nudges for different groups in society. We report results from an elicitation study in the residential electricity market in Switzerland in which we contrast...

While a carbon tax is widely acknowledged as an efficient policy to mitigate climate change, adoption has lagged. Part of the challenge resides in the distributional implications of a carbon tax and a belief that it tends to be regressive. Even when not regressive, poor households could be hurt...

Taxation data have been used to create long-run series for the distribution of top incomes in quite a number of countries. Most of these studies have focused on the national experience of individual countries, but we can also learn from cross-country comparisons. Comparative analysis is...

Based on the earlier work of one of the authors, this paper develops a unified methodology to compare tax progression for dominance relations under different income distributions. We address it as uniform tax progression for different income distributions and present the respective approach for...