Distributional Effects of a Wealth Tax under Lifetime‐Dynastic Income Concepts*

Annual wealth tax is back on the policy agenda, but discussion of its effect is not well informed. When standard methodology is used and wealth‐tax burdens are measured against annual individual income, it is found that a large share of the tax burden falls on people with low incomes. In this study, we use rich Norwegian administrative data to discuss the distributional effects of wealth tax under several different income concepts, ultimately measuring income over the lifetime of family dynasties. When measured against lifetime income and lifetime income in dynasties, wealth tax is mostly borne by high‐income taxpayers and is seen as clearly redistributive.     

Income comparison,gender roles and life satisfaction

This article uses data from the German Socio-Economic Panel to analyse the effect of within household income comparison on individual life satisfaction. Our within couple and individual fixed-effects panel estimates suggest that gender roles influence subjective well-being (SWB). A primary breadwinner wife decreases a couple’s individual happiness by eight per cent. The article adds to the findings on interdependence of SWB and hints at negative consequences of traditional gender identity norms for individual happiness.     

Income comparison and happiness: The role of fair income distribution

Relative income gap is one of the most popular approaches for explaining the income–happiness relationship. We argue in this article that when people compare their incomes, they care about distributional fairness more than relative income disparity. It is difficult for us to explain China's income–happiness paradox if we simply compare the income gap and do not explore the income‐generation process leading to income inequality. We therefore employ an approach based on a responsibility‐sensitive theory of justice that decomposes individual income into fair and unfair components. As a proxy for distributional unfairness, unfair income is considered the main source of unhappiness. Using data from the Chinese Household Income Project survey, we find strong support for the negative relationship between income unfairness and happiness. We also find a significantly positive relationship between the relative income gap and income unfairness, which leads us to consider the income comparison hypothesis as the explanation for the income–happiness paradox in a new light. Sensitivity analyses confirm the robustness of our results.     

Income and Wealth Inequality in Asia and the Pacific: Trends,Causes, and Policy Remedies

The Asia–Pacific region's rapid growth and poverty reduction in recent decades have been accompanied by rising income and wealth inequality. Technological progress, globalization, deregulation and market-oriented reform, and financialization have generated many new opportunities, but rewarded capital more than labor, benefited skilled workers more than the unskilled, widened spatial inequality, and produced a growing number of the superrich. For some countries, population aging has also contributed to rising inequality. The present paper provides an update on recent trends of income and wealth inequality in the Asia–Pacific region, examines causes behind rising inequality, and discusses policy actions needed to tackle inequality. It also assesses how the COVID-19 has likely worsened inequality in the region.     

Wealth in Latin America: Evidence from Chile,Colombia, Mexico and Uruguay

Drawing on recently-available microdata from financial surveys, this paper presents harmonized indicators for household wealth, its components, and its determinants in four Latin American countries (Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Uruguay), using Spain as a comparison benchmark. The paper analyzes the relationship between wealth indicators and sociodemographic characteristics of household heads (age, education, gender, marital status). For Uruguay, we are also able to analyze wealth patterns and intergenerational mobility (inheritance, family businesses and parental education).     

技术变化与收入分配

本文以20世纪70年代的信息技术革命为背景，运用美国商务部经济统计局生产率数据库，在此较五，六十年代和七、八十年代工资结构的基础上，提出了一个简单的技术变化模型。通过模型以及与经验观察相一致的实证研究，指出技术变化引起工人工资不平等的两种渠道；直接的途径是对于既定的资本劳动力比率来说，新技术能生产更多的产量；间接的途径是资本从非技能工人流向技能工人，从而使得前者的人均资本在技术变化前变得更少，本文的结论是：运用革命性的新技术对传统行业进行改造，构成了经济增长的最终主体，人力资本水平之高低越来越影响到最终经济的财富的总量。     

A Class of Social Welfare Functions That Depend on Mean Income and Income Polarization

A well‐established strategy for evaluating alternative income distributions is based on the use of an abbreviated social welfare function that depends only on mean income and an inequality index. In keeping with this literature, we study the existence of social welfare functions that can be written as a trade‐off between efficiency and income polarization. This paper proposes a class of social welfare functions consistent with the Esteban and Ray, and Duclos, Esteban and Ray income polarization indices. For this result, we expand the domain for personal preferences to incorporate not only own income but also the well‐being of others. In addition, we link our proposal to the literature on relative satisfaction. The approach is illustrated by an empirical application using the CPS database for the United States in the period 1991–2010.     

Evaluating Patterns of Income Growth when Status Matters: A Robust Approach

This paper addresses the problem of ranking growth episodes from a microeconomic perspective. While most of the existing criteria, framed in the pro‐poor growth tradition, are either based on anonymous individuals or are used to identify them on the basis of their status in the initial period, this paper proposes new criteria to evaluate growth, which are robust to the choice of the reference period used to identify individuals. Suitable dominance conditions that can be used to rank alternative growth processes are derived by means of an axiomatic approach. Moreover, the theoretical results are used to rank the different growth episodes that have taken place in the past decade in Australia, Germany, Korea, Switzerland, and the U.S.     

Sustainability and Wealth of Rural Households: Measurement and Inequality Analysis

A small but growing literature is linking well-being with the value of assets, measured comprehensively. This measure, called comprehensive wealth, has appeared as a leading economic indicator of sustainability by reflecting the potential of future well-being. Despite the concerns of sustainability for policy interventions at the micro-level, the existing literature is limited to country-level estimations. This paper applies the general framework of weak sustainability to measure wealth at the household level. Using data from three rounds of household survey, market prices, and yield data from rural Burkina Faso, we measure wealth, income, and consumption per adult. The results show that wealth has consistently increased over time in contrast to income and consumption which have fluctuated. Wealth is also less unequally distributed. Finally, consumption is found to be more correlated with wealth. This suggests that wealth-based interventions are more likely to improve well-being in a sustainable way.     

Non-marketed options, non-existence of equilibria, and non-linear prices

This paper presents a surprising example that shows that the lattice theoretic properties in Mas-Colell's (1986) seminal work are relevant to the existence of equilibrium even when the commodity space is finite dimensional.The example is a two-period securities model with a three-dimensional portfolio space and two traders. The paper identifies a non-marketed call option that fails to have a minimum cost super-replicating portfolio. Using this option, we construct an economy that satisfies all of Mas-Colell's assumptions, except that the three-dimensional commodity space is not a vector lattice. In this economy, there is no Walrasian equilibrium and the second theorem of welfare economics fails.Our example has important finite- as well as infinite-dimensional implications. It is also an example of a “well behaved” economy in which optimal allocations that are not supported by linear Walrasian prices are decentralized by the non-linear prices studied in Aliprantis-Tourky-Yannelis (2001).     

Wealth Concentration over the Path of Development: Sweden, 1873–2006*

We study wealth concentration in Sweden over 130 years, from the beginning of industrialization until the present day. Our series are based on new evidence from estate and wealth tax data, foreign and domestic family firm‐wealth, and pension wealth estimates. We find that Swedish wealth concentration was high in the agrarian state, and changed little during early industrialization. From World War I until about 1950, the richest percentile lost ground to high‐income earners in the rest of the top‐wealth decile. This equalization continued postwar; the entire top decile lost‐out relative to the rest of the population. Around 1980, wealth compression stopped and inequality increased. We approximate the effects of international flows and find that the recent increase in wealth inequality is probably larger than what official estimates suggest.     

Local Area Inequality and Worker Well-Being

This paper uses General Social Survey data linked to Census data to investigate the effect of local area income and income inequality on worker well-being. Others have found a robust negative correlation between reference group income and self-reported well-being. However, in many cases the reference group is defined as a large geographic area. This paper adds to the literature in two ways. First, it considers multiple nested geographic reference groups with US data. Second, it explicitly considers income inequality in addition to the level of income. It is found that both income and income inequality are positively associated with well-being at the census tract level, but negatively associated at the county level. Further, the effect of inequality on well-being decreases as income increases at the census tract and county level, while it increases at the state level.     

Life Satisfaction,Income Comparisons and Individual Traits

People gain utility from occupying a higher ranked position in the income distribution of the reference group. This paper investigates whether these gains depend on an individual's set of personality and affective traits. Using the 2000 to 2013 waves of the German Socio‐economic Panel dataset (SOEP), a subjective question on Life Satisfaction, and three different measures of personal and affective traits, we find significant and robust differences across groups and conclude that traits determine the relationship between rank and life satisfaction. The heterogeneity on the importance of income comparisons is relevant, for example, when building economic models, predicting individuals' behavior, or making welfare judgments.     

Modelling Heterogeneous Preferences for Income Redistribution–An Application of Continuous and Discrete Distributions

This paper investigates observable and unobservable heterogeneity in individuals’ preferences for redistribution—differentiating the desired overall volume of redistribution and who should receive benefits, subsidies, or transfers. We use data from a discrete choice experiment (DCE) conducted in the field and based on a representative sample of the German voting‐age population. Applying random parameters and latent class models, our results show that latent and potentially discontinuously distributed factors must be accounted for, as they heavily impact the interpretation of the findings. We find considerable heterogeneity in redistribution preferences, clearly identifying three distinct subgroups. While all groups are in favor of redistribution, they differ regarding the preferred allocation of the redistributive budget.     

House Prices,Wealth and Consumption: New Evidence from Australia and Canada

Over the past two decades, a number of countries have experienced appreciation in house prices at the same time that aggregate consumption has increased. This paper tests alternative hypotheses for this phenomenon by using repeated household surveys from Australia and Canada to identify the transmission mechanism that links consumption and household wealth. The empirical analysis suggests that neither a direct wealth effect nor a common causal factor likely accounts for the observed correlation between wealth and consumption in these two countries. Rather, indirect factors such as collateral effects arising from relaxation of credit constraints are a more likely explanation.     

Wealth Effects,Local Area Attributes,and Economic Prospects: On the Relationship between House Prices and Mental Wellbeing

This research exploits large variations in local house prices to investigate whether house prices correlate with mental wellbeing, and uses contrasting implications for the effect of house prices on the mental wellbeing of homeowners and renters to shed light on why this correlation might arise. I document a positive correlation between house prices and the mental wellbeing of both homeowners and non‐homeowners, which is inconsistent with a pure wealth effect. Instead this finding suggests that local house prices provide a reflection of available amenities and economic opportunities in the area.     

Income inequality and income bias in voter turnout

In the era of growing income inequality around the world, it remains inconclusive how higher income inequality affects income bias in turnout (i.e., high-income citizens vote more likely than low-income citizens). Using large-scale cross-national survey data, we show that (1) strong income bias in turnout exists in many parts of the world, (2) higher income inequality is related to lower income bias in turnout by demobilizing high-income citizens and mobilizing low-income citizens, and (3) this relationship is partly explained by the pattern that vote buying is more common in societies with higher income inequality and thus mobilizes low-income citizens but decreases political efficacy among high-income citizens. Ultimately, this study suggests that growing income inequality may not exaggerate political inequality, but may challenge the legitimacy of democratic elections.     

Parental Wealth and the Black–White Mobility Gap in the U.S.

Utilizing longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), this paper examines the relationship between parental wealth and intergenerational income mobility for black and white families. I find that total parental wealth is positively associated with upward mobility for low‐income white families, but is not associated with reduced likelihood of downward mobility for white families from the top half of the income distribution. Conversely, I find that total parental wealth does not have the same positive association for low‐income black families, while home ownership may have negative associations with the likelihood of upward mobility for these families. However, for black families from the top half of the income distribution, home equity is associated with a decreased likelihood of downward mobility, suggesting a heterogeneous relationship between home ownership and mobility for black families.     

Healthy,Wealthy, and Happy: The Joint Role of Health and Income in Explaining Global Life Satisfaction

Based on Gallup World Poll data, we explore the heterogeneous evolution of income, health, and well-being within world population subgroups identified according to country, gender, age, and education, offering an integrated approach with wide geographical coverage. We provide novel evidence on the global “winners” and “losers” in life satisfaction between 2009 and 2018, showing that individuals located at the bottom of the global income distribution and those with poor health saw pronounced reductions in life satisfaction as opposed to populations with incomes falling between the 60th and the 80th centile and the healthy ones, who experienced significant improvements. Our results highlight that health is at least on a par with income in explaining life satisfaction, although there are considerable differences across world regions. In particular, health supersedes income in its relevance to life satisfaction, mostly in more affluent world regions, while the opposite holds in destitute parts of the world.     

Purely procedural preferences - Beyond procedural equity and reciprocity

We conduct experiments in which parties face a pair of two-player pie-splitting procedures. Parties submit their strategy in each, their beliefs about their opponent's choices, and are also asked whether they prefer one procedure over the other. The procedures – a yes-no game, an ultimatum game, and a dictator game – are designed such that by all existing economic preference models, whether distributive or procedural, parties should be indifferent between them. In particular, the procedures should yield the same outcomes, the same expected outcomes and carry the same information on parties' intentions. At the same time, the procedures differ in the way they distribute decision and information rights across players, and also in their complexity and efficiency. Experimentally, parties do indeed still reveal preferences over the procedures at hand. To explore why this happens, we elicit individuals' simplicity and efficiency ratings of the procedures, and also the degree by which individuals invoke the equality of basic rights and liberties in their moral judgement – an ethical criterion not yet captured by any preference model. The preferences we find link to this data. We explore formalizations for such preferences.