This paper provides a brief survey of the literature on the effects of the 1990s infrastructure reforms in Latin America on income distribution. It identifies major holes in the coverage of policy issues by the academic literature, including a much needed distinction between access and...

Tax reform, particularly business tax reform, could be affected by the recent CBO/JCT integration of macroeconomic effects (dynamic scoring) into the official estimate of the Senate immigration bill. Another technical wrinkle is that major institutional approaches to tax distribution all favor,...

The present study reports the findings of a survey conducted by the World Values Survey scientists in the United States on the question of whether governments should tax the rich and subsidize the poor. The sample size of 2166 consisted of individuals from all parts of the United States. A...

Many distribution models that are workhorses for tax policy, and more broadly for research on immobility and inequality, are insufficient welfare measures of either the status quo or policy proposals. This paper explores two fundamental modeling problems: The omission of corporate income, and...

This research exploits novel evidence on current and historical inequality dynamics, as well as an instrumental variable (IV) strategy (founded on historical settler mortality à la Acemoglu et al.), to document the fundamental role of income redistribution through taxes and transfers in...

Entitlement programs have become an increasing component of total government spending in the US over the last six decades. To some observers, this growth of the welfare state is excessive and unwarranted. To others, it is a welcome counter-acting force to the rapid increase in income inequality....

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...

The income tax taxes the proceeds from market work, but not the proceeds from time otherwise allocated - whether enjoyed as self-provided goods and services or leisure time per se. A two-earner couple that out-sources household and child care services, for instance, pays for these services with...