Traub, Stefan

In this paper, we provide a two-country, two-class model of asymmetric capital tax competition. We show formally that poor people living in small countries can benefit from capital tax competition and therefore they are in favor of it. In order to benefit from capital inflow from larger countries, poor people in smaller countries accept less within-country income redistribution. As a consequence, between-country income inequality is increased by tax competition. © The editors of The Scandinavian Journal of Economics 2019.

One feature of legislative bargaining in naturally occurring settings is that the distribution of seats or voting weights often does not accurately reflect bargaining power. Game-theoretic predictions about payoffs and coalition formation are insensitive to nominal differences in vote distributions and instead only depend on pivotality. We conduct an experimental test of the classical Baron-Ferejohn model with five-player groups. Holding real power constant, we compare treatments with differences in nominal power. We find that initial effects of nominal differences become small or disappear with experience. Our results also point to the complexity of the environment as having a negative impact on the speed at which this transition takes place. Finally, and of particular importance as a methodological observation, giving subjects a pause accelerates learning. © 2019 Elsevier Inc.

Societal acceptance for the political goals of Germany’s Energiewende is heavily impacted by its distributional consequences as well as private households‘ individual conceptions of justice. The empirical investigation of this relationship is the main contribution of this article, which summarizes the results of the research project AKZEPTANZ financed by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). From our empirical evidence we can draw three main conclusions regarding private households‘ preferences for distributing the cost of the Energiewende. First, there is a strong preference for the ability-to-pay principle in order to finance green electricity. Second, cost uncertainty makes the ability-to-pay principle less attractive. Third, subsidizing investments into energy efficiency may lead to counterproductive reactions. © 2017, List-Gesellschaft e.V.

In this paper, we model social preferences as a function of the skewness of the distribution of initial endowments. Skewness is a measure of the asymmetry of the distribution of endowments around the mean. We argue that skewness reflects the social distance between ‘elite’ players with high initial endowments and other players with lower endowments, better than variance and concentration measures like the Gini-coefficient. We hypothesize that elite players become more selfish with increasing skewness and therefore contribute less to a public good in the framework of a one-shot non-linear public good game. The results of an experimental test, in which we systematically vary the distribution of endowments between treatments, confirm that the model is able to correctly explain the observed pattern of contribution behavior. We find that cooperation and efficiency are lowest with right-skewed distribution of endowments. Our paper therefore improves the understanding of the behavioral link between inequality and efficiency.

We introduce a skewness-based approach to measure tax progression and demand for redistribution. Adapting a novel, quantilebased statistical measure of skewness to right-skewed income distributions, we uncover its political economy foundation, by simultaneously relating the same measure to the classical model of income redistribution due to Meltzer and Richard (1981), to the Prospect Of Upward Mobility (POUM) mechanism due to B`enabou and Ok (2001), and to the progressivity of a tax schedule. In an empirical analysis of UK income distributions in 1979 – 2013, we find that skewness has increased over time, with the rich moving further away from the median. While the magnitude of the increase has remained small enough so that observed redistribution (or lack thereof ) could be consistent with POUM hypothesis, more recent periods show an increase in tax progression.