Using data on U.S. state and federal taxes and transfers over a quarter century, we estimate a regression model that yields the marginal effect of any shift of market income share from one quintile to another on the entire post tax, post-transfer income distribution. We identify exogenous income...

The current system of federalism undermines the social and economic equality of the people of the United States. Although states have broad responsibilities to provide basic services, they have vastly different financial capacities. Some states are richer while others are poorer, and these...

The fields of regulatory federalism and fiscal federalism have developed largely in isolation from each other. Building on the new scholarship of federalism in the legal academy, this Article seeks to integrate the insights of the two areas. The financial dimension offers a crucial perspective...

This paper investigates the relationship between fiscal decentralisation and economy-wide disposable income inequality. Drawing on a dataset of up to 20 OECD countries over a period from 1996 to 2011, a regression analysis is performed, relating several indicators of national income inequality...

In his important new book, The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution, Ganesh Sitaraman argues that growing economic inequality over the last several decades and the resulting decline of the middle class is “the number one threat to American constitutional government.” He also contends that...

Decentralization had been a common public finance reform among developing countries in the past few decades. Some advocates pushed for decentralization reform as an answer to the growing problem of income inequality. The primary argument for decentralization was that sub-national governments had...

Do income taxes levied at a state or regional level affect the after-tax distribution of income? Or do workers merely move between regions, causing pre-tax wages to adjust? This question is relevant both in across states in the United States, and across countries within the European Union. Using...

In well-functioning democracies, the policymaking process should in principle respond to persistent economic inequality with corrective policies. This process is set in motion through majority demands for redistributive taxation and spending that elected representatives eventually supply through...

Neither income, consumption, nor wealth is an "ideal" tax base, or one that plausibly identifies what one really should want to tax. Rather, they are best justified as imperfect stand-ins for some underlying (but unobservable) metric of inequality that may be relevant to distributive justice...

We study optimal climate policy in a global economy where regions differ in wealth and climate vulnerability. Carbon emissions from production lead to output losses, and there is a technology for emissions absorption. We provide an aggregation result: the model with heterogeneity can be cast...