Redistributive taxation and public expenditures

Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay () and Joan Esteban ()

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: We introduce a model of redistributive income taxation and public expenditure. Besides redistributing personal income by means of taxes and transfers, the government supplies goods and services. The government chooses the tax schedule that is found acceptable by the largest share possible of the population. We show that there is a unique income tax schedule that is universally acceptable. The progressivity of the income tax is shown to depend on the composition of the public expenditure and on the substitutability between the goods and services supplied by the government and the consumption goods privately obtained through the market. We test the empirical implications of the model. Specifically, we use OECD data to observe the relationship between marginal tax rates and the distribution over the taxpayers of the benefits produced by the specific composition of the government expenditure in the provision of goods and services. We confirm that for lower elasticities of substitution between public and private goods, there is a negative relationship between marginal tax rates and pro-taxpayerbias, and for higher elasiticities, there is a positive relationship.

Keywords: Government policy; Income Taxation; Public Expenditure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E6 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 47 pages
Date: 2007-10
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/6537/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Redistributive Taxation and PublicExpenditures (2007)
Working Paper: Redistributive Taxation and Public Expenditures (2007)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:6537

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