We introduce a skewness-based approach to measure tax progression and demand for redistribution. We provide a political economy foundation for a novel measure of skewness by expressing key properties of the classical model of voting over income redistribution (Meltzer and Richard, 1981) and the...

We propose a method to decompose changes in the tax structure into a component measuring the level of taxes and a component orthogonal to the level that measures progressivity. While our focus is on the progessivity results, we find that the level shock is similar to standard tax shocks found in...

We study the link between tax progressivity and top income shares. Using variation from large-scale Western tax reforms in the 1980s and 1990s and the novel synthetic control method, we find large and lasting boosting impacts on top income shares from the progressivity reductions. Effects are...