How to explain rising income and wealth inequality? We build an original heterogeneous-agent model with three key features: (i) an explicit link between firm's market power and top income shares, (ii) a granular representation of the tax and transfer system, and (iii) three assets with...

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 evolution of the ratio of direct taxation (characterized by progressive rates) over indirect and payroll taxation (characterized by flat rates) is examined together with its distributional consequences for the Bottom 50%, Middle 40% and Top 10% shares of income. Oscillations of this ratio...

Thirty years after the "Washington Consensus", is there a new policy consensus that addresses the problem of inequality? This paper argues that there is widespread acceptance that multiple, interrelated and mutually reinforcing inequalities exist - in income, wealth, education, health, power,...

This study employs a randomized control experiment featuring a dictator game and a representative participant pool (n=600) to establish the causal effect of information on inequality perception and altruistic behavior. The results show mixed effects of the information intervention on voluntary...

What matters for individuals' preferences for redistribution? In this paper we show that consequentialist beliefs about inequality - beliefs about how economic inequality changes the crime rate or the quality of democratic institutions, for example - have a large causal impact on individuals'...

This note investigates the impact of greater income inequality on the tax base, on the defacto fiscal space, and the sovereign spreads. Using data from 50 countries in 2005 and in 2010, we find that higher income inequality is associated with a lower tax base, lower de-facto fiscal space, and...

This paper investigates the association between greater income inequality, de-facto fiscal space, and sovereign spreads. Using data from 50 countries in 2007, in 2009 and in 2011, we find that higher income inequality is associated with a lower tax base, lower de-facto fiscal space, and higher...

This paper uses pseudo panel techniques and a fixed effects estimator to analyse the determinants of preferences for redistribution in 34 European countries over the period 2002-2012. The data is drawn from the six available waves of the European Social Survey. The main result is that changes in...