The analysis contrasts results of two recently expounded micro-level data approaches to derive robust intertemporal characterizations of redistributional effects of income tax schedules; the fixed-income procedure of Kasten, Sammartino and Toder (1994) and the transplant-and-compare method of...

Tax systems with separate taxation of wage and capital income, also called dual income tax systems, have gained relevance through the Mirrlees Review. Obviously, such tax systems are exposed to horizontal equity (HE) failures, or horizontal inequity (HI). HE and HI have a firm grip on assessment...

Empirical findings on the relationship between income inequality and redistribution from a cross-country perspective are not conclusive. One reason may be that observers have in mind different concepts of redistribution. A major factor is that comparator countries' pre-fisc distributions...

The overall inequality effects of a dual income tax (DIT) system, combining progressive taxation of labor income with proportional taxation of income from capital, are investigated. Simple examples show that correlations between distributions of wage and capital income, the degree of tax rate...

Given an objective to exploit cross-sectional micro data to evaluate the distributional effects of tax policies over a time period, the practitioner of public economics will find that the relevant literature offers a wide variety of empirical approaches. For example, studies vary with respect to...

Which country is most redistributive? This question is often discussed in terms of comparisons of measures of redistribution when each country's tax schedule is applied to its pre-tax income distribution. However, we believe that what most authors have in mind when referring to the "most...

A widely accepted criterion for pro-poorness of an income growth pattern is that it should reduce a (chosen) measure of poverty by more than if all incomes were growing equiproportionately. Inequality reduction is not generally seen as either necessary or sufficient for pro-poorness. Because...

A well-known criterion to make heterogeneous welfare comparisons is Atkinson and Bourguignon’s (1987) sequential generalized Lorenz dominance (SGLD) criterion. Recently, Fleurbaey, Hagneré and Trannoy (2003) convincingly argue that it contains unreasonable household utility profiles and...

The decomposition of the redistributive effect of an income tax into vertical, horizontal and reranking contributions according to the model of Aronson, Johnson and Lambert (1994), henceforth AJL, is revisited. When close equals groups are used, rather than the exact equals groups upon which the...

We examine the effect on inequality of increasing one income, and show that for two wide classes of indices a benchmark income level or position exists, dividing upper from lower incomes, such that if a lower income is raised, inequality falls, and if an upper income is raised, inequality rises....