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...

Over the past decades, productivity growth and technology diffusion have slowed down, and business dynamism has declined in many advanced and emerging economies. Meanwhile, inequalities in economic outcomes, such as in income and wealth, and in opportunities, such as access to quality education...

This paper estimates an individual level demand model for eggs differentiated by animal welfare. Typically, after minimum quality standards for eggs are raised, the price of higher quality eggs falls. As a result, consumer welfare is redistributed from households who do not value animal welfare...

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...

One question in the most recent World Values Survey asked whether it is an essential characteristic of democratic governments to tax the rich and subsidize the poor. The present study reports the findings of the survey conducted in South Korea. The overall response and relative ranking are...

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...

This study used the most recent World Values Survey dataset to determine whether Christian and Muslim views on the acceptability of taxing the rich and subsidizing the poor was an essential feature of democracy. The sample size included more than 23,000 individuals from more than 50 countries....

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,...

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....