, and distributions of posttax income flatter, in countries with proportional representation than in those with majority rule. While there are other differences between these countries, this paper explores how variations in the political system per se influence equilibrium redistributive tax rates and income

a research assistant at the NBER. We are grateful to members of the NBER Public Economics Program and the Harvard-MIT Public Finance Seminar for discussions and comments on this work and to Daniel Feenberg for assistance with the TAXSIM calculations reported in section

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Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, 23–24 September 2006. UNU-WIDER gratefully acknowledges the financial contribution of the Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs to this project, and the contributions from the governments of Denmark (Royal Ministry of

population, their dependents, and survivors with the 1986 payroll tax incidence of the working population. Findings indicate that a consider-able degree of redistribution occurs from middle- and high-income tax payers to poor and near-poor beneficiaries. The paper also analyzes the demographic

This paper develops a simulation model in order to examine the effectiveness of state attempts at redistribution under a variety of migration elasticity assumptions. Key outputs from the simulation include the impact of tax-induced migration on state revenues, excess burden, and fi scal

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“Redistribution is accomplished more efficiently through the income tax than through the use of legal rules, even when redistributive taxes distort behaviour...it is appropriate for economic analysis of legal rules to focus on efficiency and to ignore the distribution of income in offering

Abstract: A common, though by no means universally-accepted doctrine among practitioners of law and economics is that redistribution is no business of the law. This efficiency-only doctrine is not that redistribution is unworthy as a social objective, but that any given benefit to the poor