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Frank A Cowell and Emmanuel Flachaire
Many standard inequality measures can be written as ratios with the mean in the denominator. When one income moves away from equality, both the numerator and the denominator may vary in the same direction and such indic...Read more...
27 June 2018
Frank A Cowell, Chang He and Dirk Van de gaer
It is well known that taxes on the transfer of wealth typically raise very little revenue. However, this does not mean that they are ineffective as tools for redistribution. In this paper we show how important such tax...Read more...
8 December 2017
Frank A Cowell and Dirk Van de gaer
Using a simple model of family decision making we examine the processes by which the wealth distribution changes over the generations, focusing in particular on the division of fortunes through inheritance and the unio...Read more...
Camille Landais, Arash Nekoei, Peter Nilsson, David Seim and Johannes Spinnewijn
This paper studies whether adverse selection can rationalize a universal mandate for unemployment insurance (UI). Building on a unique feature of the unemployment policy in Sweden, where workers can opt for supplemental ...Read more...
10 October 2017
A Brandolini, Stephen P Jenkins and John Micklewright
Tony Atkinson is universally celebrated for his outstanding contributions to the measurement and analysis of inequality, but he never saw the study of inequality as a separate branch of economics. He was an economist in...Read more...
27 June 2017
Frank A Cowell, Martyna Kobus and Radoslaw Kurek
Decision makers and social planners are often faced with a problem of evaluating distributions of ordinal variables i.e. variables for which there are no numbers but only the ordering, such as, for example, self-reported...Read more...
22 March 2017
Stephen P Jenkins
I determine UK income inequality levels and trends by combining inequality estimates from tax return data (for the `rich?) and household survey data (for the `non-rich?), taking advantage of the better coverage of top i...Read more...
18 August 2016
Timothy Besley and James M. Malcolmson
In spite of a range of policy initiatives in sectors such as education, health care and legal services, whether choice and competition is valuable remains contested territory. This paper studies the impact of choice and ...Read more...
16 August 2016
Timothy Besley
In standard approaches to the political economy of inequality, the income distribution and the preferences of households are taken as fixed when studying how incomes are determined within and between nations. This paper ...Read more...
Panos Mavrokonstantis
In this paper I investigate the intergenerational transmission of gender norms. The norm I focus on is the traditional view that it is the role of the mother to look after young children and the role of the father to be...Read more...
27 November 2015
Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman
This paper combines income tax returns with macroeconomic household balance sheets to estimate the distribution of wealth in the United States since 1913. We estimate wealth by capitalizing the incomes reported by indivi...Read more...
8 September 2015
Joan Costa-Font and Frank A Cowell
Social identity is increasingly accepted as a key concept underpin- ning the endogeneity of economic behaviour and preferences. This feature is especially important in explaining redistribution preferences as well as att...Read more...
1 August 2015
Stephen P Jenkins and Philippe Van Kerm
Assessments of whose income growth is the greatest and whose is the smallest are typically based on comparisons of income changes for income groups (e.g. rich versus poor) or income values (e.g. quantiles). However, inco...Read more...
January
Jonas Kolsrud, Camille Landais, Peter Nilsson and Johannes Spinnewijn
This paper provides a simple, yet general framework to analyze the optimal time profile of benefits during the unemployment spell. We derive simple sufficient-statistics formulae capturing the insurance value and incenti...Read more...
3 July 2015
How important is spatial identity in shifting preferences for redistribution? This paper takes advantage of within-country variability in the adoption of a single currency as an instrument to examine the impact of the re...Read more...
1 July 2015
Gordon B. Dahl, Magne Mogstad and Andreas Ravndal Kostol
Strong intergenerational correlations in various types of welfare use have fuelled a long- standing debate over whether welfare receipt in one generation causes welfare participation in the next generation. Some claim a ...Read more...
25 June 2014
Paul Beadry, Paul Beaudry, David A. Green and Ben Sand
What explains the current low rate of employment in the US? While there has been substantial debate over this question in recent years, we believe that considerable added insight can be derived by focusing on changes in ...Read more...
21 February 2014
Richard Blundell, Monica Costa Dias, Costas Meghir and Jonathan Shaw
We consider the impact of tax credits and income support programs on female education choice, employment,hours and human capital accumulation over the life-cycle. We analyze both the short run incentive e?ects and the lo...Read more...
Imran Rasul and Daniel Rogger
We study how the management practices that bureaucrats operate under, correlate to the quantity and quality of public services delivered. We do so in a developing country context, exploiting data from the Nigerian Civil ...Read more...
20 February 2014
Casey Rothschild and Florian Scheuer
We develop a unifying framework for optimal income taxation in multi-sector economies with general patterns of externalities. Agents in this model are characterized by an N-dimensional skill vector corresponding to intri...Read more...
Yi Chen and Frank A Cowell
We examine the evidence on rank and income mobility in China during the decades immediately preceding and immediately following the millennium using panel data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey. We show that ran...Read more...
13 May 2013
Yoram Amiel, Michele Bernasconi, Michele Bernasconi, Frank A Cowell, Valentino Dardanoni and Valentino Dardanoni
Is there a trade-off between people's preference for income equality and income mobility? Testing for the existence of such a trade-off is difficult because mobility is a multifaceted concept. We analyse results from a q...Read more...
10 May 2013
Camille Landais
I investigate in this paper partial equilibrium labor supply responses to unemployment insurance (UI) in the US. I use administrative data on the universe of unemployment spells in five states from 1976 to 1984, and non-...Read more...
1 July 2012
Henrik Kleven, Camille Landais and Emmanuel Saez
This paper analyzes the effects of top earnings tax rates on the international migration of top football players in Europe. We construct a panel data set of top earnings tax rates, football player careers, and club perfo...Read more...
1 February 2012
Henrik Kleven and Esben Anton Schultz
This paper presents evidence on taxable income responses using administrative data that link tax return information to detailed socioeconomic information for the full Danish population over 25 years. The identifying vari...Read more...
Daria Burnes, David Neumark and Michelle J. White
We test the hypothesis that local government officials in jurisdictions that have higher local sales taxes are more likely to use fiscal zoning to encourage retailing. We find that total retail employment is not signific...Read more...
1 June 2011
Roger H. Gordon and Wojciech Kopczuk
Starting with Mirrlees (1971) and Vickrey (1945), the optimal tax literature has studied the design of a personal income tax. The ideal would be to tax earnings ability. Earnings ability is unobservable for tax purposes,...Read more...
June 2011
Our new approach to mobility measurement involves separating out the valuation of positions in terms of individual status (using income, social rank, or other criteria) from the issue of movement between positions. The q...Read more...
April 2011
Charles F. Manski
Analyses of public policy regularly express certitude about the consequences of alternative policy choices. Yet policy predictions often are fragile, with conclusions resting on critical unsupported assumptions or leaps ...Read more...
February 2011
Mikhail Golosov, Aleh Tsyvinsky and Matthew Weinzierl
We analytically and quantitatively examine a prominent justification for capital income taxation: goods preferred by those with high ability ought to be taxed. We study an environment where commodity taxes are allowed to...Read more...
June 2010
Frank A Cowell, Marc Fleurbaey and Bertil Tungodden
We address a puzzle in welfare economics ? the possibility that rational people may be simultaneously against two apparently con?icting forms of ?tyranny.? In fact the two types of tyranny can be reconciled but at the po...Read more...
May 2010
Alan J. Auerbach and Michael P. Devereux
We model the effects of consumption-type taxes which differ according to the base and location of the tax. Our model incorporates a monopolist producing and selling in two countries with three sources of rent, each in a ...Read more...
Louis Kaplow
A substantial literature examines second-best environmental policy, focusing particularly on how the Pigouvian directive that marginal taxes should equal marginal external harms needs to be modified in light of the preex...Read more...
Kevin Milligan and Mark Stabile
A vast literature has examined the impact of family income on the health and development outcomes of children. One channel through which increased income may operate is an improvement in a family's ability to provide foo...Read more...
Mikhail Golosov, Aleh Tayvinski and Matthew Weinzierl
We analytically and quantitatively examine a prominent justi.cation for capital income taxation: goods preferred by those with high ability ought to be taxed. We study an environment where commodity taxes are allowed to ...Read more...
January 2010
