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Working Paper
Majority Voting in a Model of Means Testing
Glomm, Gerhard; Ravikumar, B.; Cardak, Buly A. (2018-06-01)
We study a model of endogenous means testing where households differ in their income and where the in-kind transfer received by each household declines with income. Majority voting determines the two dimensions of public policy: the size of the welfare program and the means-testing rate. We establish the existence of a sequential majority voting equilibrium and show that the means-testing rate increases with the size of the program but the fraction and the identity of the households receiving the transfers are independent of the program size. Furthermore, the set of subsidy recipients does ...
Working Papers , Paper 2018-14

Working Paper
Political Connections, Allocation of Stimulus Spending, and the Jobs Multiplier
Choi, Joonkyu; Saffie, Felipe; Penciakova, Veronika (2021-01-29)
Using American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) data, we show that firms lever their political connections to win stimulus grants and public expenditure channeled through politically connected firms hinders job creation. We build a unique database that links campaign contributions and state legislative election outcomes to ARRA grant allocation. Using exogenous variation in political connections based on ex-post close elections held before ARRA, we causally show that politically connected firms are 64 percent more likely to secure a grant. Based on an instrumental variable approach, we ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2021-005

Working Paper
The political economy of endogenous taxation and redistribution
Dolmas, Jim; Huffman, Gregory W. (1997)
This paper examines a simple dynamic model in which agents vote over capital income taxation and redistributive transfers. We show that in equilibrium the typical agent's preferences over the tax rate are single-peaked and derive a closed-form solution for the majority-rule tax rate. We also show that high levels of initial wealth inequality can place the economy on the 'wrong side of the Laffer curve'.
Working Papers , Paper 9704

Working Paper
Incumbency Disadvantage in U.S. National Politics: The Role of Policy Inertia and Prospective Voting
Eyigungor, Burcu; Chatterjee, Satyajit (2017-12-21)
We document that postwar U.S. national elections show a strong pattern of incumbency disadvantage": If the presidency has been held by a party for some time, that party tends to lose seats in Congress. We develop a model of partisan politics with policy inertia and prospective voting to explain this finding. Positive and normative implications of the model are explored.
Working Papers , Paper 17-43

Working Paper
Majority Voting in a Model of Means Testing
Glomm, Gerhard; Ravikumar, B.; Cardak, Buly A. (2019-11-27)
We study a model of endogenous means testing where households differ in their income and where the in-kind transfer received by each household declines with income. Majority voting determines the two dimensions of public policy: the size of the welfare program and the means-testing rate. We establish the existence of a sequential majority voting equilibrium and show that the means-testing rate increases with the size of the program but the fraction and the identity of the households receiving the transfers are independent of the program size. Furthermore, the set of subsidy recipients does ...
Working Papers , Paper 2018-14

Working Paper
Politicians Avoid Tax Increases Around Elections
Chang, Andrew C.; Cohen, Linda R.; Glazer, Amihai; Paul, Urbashee (2021-01-29)
We use new annual data on gasoline taxes and corporate income taxes from U.S. states to analyze whether politicians avoid tax increases in election years. These data contain 3 useful attributes: (1) when state politicians enact tax laws, (2) when state politicians implement tax laws on consumers and firms, and (3) the size of tax changes. Using a pre-analysis research plan that includes regressions of tax rate changes and tax enactment years on time-to-gubernatorial election year indicators, we find that elections decrease the probability of politicians enacting increases in taxes and reduce ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2021-004

Working Paper
Optimal Fiscal Reform with Many Taxes
Carroll, Daniel R.; Luduvice, Andre; Young, Eric R. (2023-02-09)
We study the optimal one-shot tax reform in the standard incomplete markets model where households differ in their wealth, earnings, permanent labor skill, and age. The government can provide transfers by raising tax revenue and has several tax instruments at its disposal: a flat capital income tax, a flat consumption tax, and a non-linear labor income tax. The optimal fiscal policy funds a transfer that is nearly 50 percent of GDP through a combination of very high taxes on consumption and capital income. The labor tax schedule has a high average rate but is also moderately progressive. We ...
Working Papers , Paper 23-07

Working Paper
Income inequality and political polarization: time series evidence over nine decades
Saving, Jason L.; Duca, John V. (2014-01-01)
Rising income inequality and political polarization have led some to hypothesize that the two are causally linked. Properly interpreting such correlations is complicated by the multiple factors that drive each of these phenomena, potential feedbacks between inequality and polarization, measurement issues, and statistical challenges for modeling non-stationary variables. We find that a more precise measure of inequality (the inverted Pareto-Lorenz coefficient) is statistically related to polarization while a less precise one (top 1% income share) is not, and that there are bi-directional ...
Working Papers , Paper 1408

Working Paper
The Politics of Flat Taxes
Dolmas, Jim; Carroll, Daniel R.; Young, Eric R. (2017-09-06)
We study the determination of flat tax systems using a workhorse macroeconomic model of inequality. Our first result is that, despite the multidimensional policy space, equilibrium policies are typically unique (up to a fine grid numerical approximation). The majority voting outcome features (i) zero labor income taxation, (ii) simultaneous use of capital income and consumption taxation, and (iii) generally low transfers. We discuss the role of three factors?the initial heterogeneity in sources of income, the mobility of income and wealth, and the forward-looking aspect of voting?in ...
Working Papers , Paper 14-42R

Working Paper
Polarized Contributions but Convergent Agendas
Drautzburg, Thorsten; Livshits, Igor; Wright, Mark L. J. (2022-09-06)
The political process in the United States appears to be highly polarized: Data show that the political positions of legislators have diverged substantially, while the largest campaign contributions come from the most extreme donor groups and are directed to the most extreme candidates. Is the rise in campaign contributions the cause of the growing political polarization? In this paper, we show that, in standard models of campaign contributions and electoral competition, a free-rider problem among potential contributors leads naturally to polarization of campaign contributors but without any ...
Working Papers , Paper 22-29

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