The article examines conditions, under which the degree of democratization influences environmental policy outcomes, with a given resource endowments' heterogeneity as a crucial feature of a politico-economic process. We develop an OLG model with pollution as an aggregate externality. The...

We study the interaction between competitive markets that produce large but unequally distributed welfare gains and elections through which the poor majority can redistribute income away from the rich minority. In our simple laboratory democracy, subjects first earn their income by trading in a...

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...

In cross-sectional studies, countries with greater income inequality typically exhibit less support for government-led redistribution and greater acceptance of wage inequality (e.g., United States versus Western Europe). If individual nations evolve along this pattern, a vicious cycle could form...

This paper examines the political economy of redistribution when voters have asymmetric information about the redistributive preferences of politicians and the latter cannot make credible policy commitments. The candidates in each party are endogenously selected by a process of Nash Bargaining...

The classic democratic theory of redistribution claims that an increase in the mean-to-median (MM) income ratio causes a majority coalition in the electorate to collectively demand more redistribution. The functional dependence of redistribution on the MM income ratio is tested in parametric and...

We study the interaction between competitive markets and income redistribution that reallocates unequal pre-tax market incomes away from the rich to the poor majority. In one setup, participants earn their income by trading in a double auction (DA) with exogenous zero or full redistribution. In...

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 study to what extend in a Tiebout economy, the exogenous distribution of skill across agents affects the compatibility between mobility an redistribution. We propose a two-region economy where: i) each region redistributive policy is elected by majority rule (where both cases: myopic and...

The main question addressed in this paper is how the possibility of investing in tax avoidance affects voting and redistributive outcomes in an economy where the tax rate is determined by a majority vote and taxes go to lump-sum redistribution. The outcome depends on the timing and efficiency of...