Suchergebnisse

Sind die makroökonomischen Präferenzen von Bürgern länderspezifisch? Und wenn ja, was sind die Ursachen, und wie können damit die Festlegung des institutionellen geldpolitischen Rahmens, Wirtschaftspolitik oder internationale geldpolitische Zusammenarbeit erklärt werden? Für zwanzig Industrieländer ergeben sich aus der Auswertung individueller makroökonomischer Präferenzen für die Zeit von 1976 bis 1997 dazu im wesentlichen drei Erkenntnisse: Erstens scheint das wirtschaftliche Umfeld - hier definiert als Inflation und die Entwicklung der Arbeitslosigkeit - die wirtschaftlichen Wunschvorstellungen der Öffentlichkeit in etwa so zu beeinflussen, wie sie durch die Spezifizierung der gesellschaftlichen Kosten- bzw. Nutzenfunktion in Beiträgen zur Ökonomischen Theorie der Politik modelliert werden. Zweitens variieren diese Inflationspräferenzen in den betrachteten Ländern, wenn man dieses wirtschaftliche Umfeld mit berücksichtigt. Und drittens kann diese Variation teilweise auf länderspezifische Faktoren - bspw. Erfahrung mit Hyperinflation - zurück geführt werden, welche sich wiederum auf die gesellschaftlichen Kosten von Inflation und Arbeitslosigkeit auswirken. Für die geldpolitische Forschung ergeben sich damit neue Möglichkeiten für die Ausgestaltung optimaler Geldpolitik, der geeigneten Wahl des institutionellen Rahmens der geldpolitischen Instanz und mithin dem Verständnis für unterschiedliche wirtschaftliche Entwicklungen. (kss-swp)

We study the international origins of the neo-welfare state in Britain during the era of globalization before World War I. We introduce a new mechanism linking trade to the expansion of the state. In addition to increasing assessments of the volatility of employment in a market economy, trade shocks changed beliefs about the deservingness of the poor. Employing a shift-share measure of local exposure to German imports, we show that rising imports caused worse labor market outcomes from 1880 to 1910. Import competition led to a decrease in support for the Conservative Party in national elections after 1900, when the Liberal Party supported welfare state reforms. We further show that rising imports increased the use in local newspapers of scientific terms like "unemployment" relative to pejorative terms like "vagrancy" to describe the poor. Political responses to globalization helped shape voter support for the modern British welfare state at its inception.

We argue that tax policy typically does not respond to inequality because many voters hold equal treatment fairness beliefs for which the expectation is that, just as all have one vote, the state should treat citizens equally on other dimensions of policy. In the tax domain, this means all should pay the same rate. We propose a new survey instrument to measure equal treatment beliefs and implement it in surveys in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We document in all three countries a robust negative partial correlation between the strength of individual equal treatment beliefs and preferences for higher taxes on the rich. We also present results from a survey experiment in the United States that exposes respondents to a violation of equal treatment beliefs—voting weighted by educational attainment. Exposure to this treatment both increases the strength of equal treatment beliefs and decreases support for progressive taxation.

What do we know about wealth inequality and democracy? Our review shows that the simple conjectures that democracy produces wealth equality and that wealth inequality leads to democratic failure are not supported by the evidence. Why are democracy and high levels of wealth inequality sustainable together? Three key features of democratic politics can make this outcome possible. When societies are divided along cleavages other than wealth, this can inhibit the adoption of wealth-equalizing policies. Likewise, voter preferences for the redistribution of wealth depend on the beliefs they form about the fairness of these measures, and some voters without wealth may feel that redistribution is unfair. Finally, wealth-equalizing policies may be absent if the democratic process is captured by the rich; however, the evidence explaining when, where, and why capture accounts for variation in wealth inequality is less convincing than is often claimed. This phenomenon is a useful avenue for future research.

The politics of economic crises brings distributive economic conflict to the fore of national political debates. How policy should be used to transfer resources between citizens becomes a central political question, and the answers chosen often influence the trajectory of policy for a generation. This context provides an ideal setting for evaluating the importance of self-interest and other-regarding preferences in shaping public opinion about economic policy. This article investigates whether self-centered inequity aversion along with self-interest influences individual tax policy opinions. We conduct original survey experiments in France and the United States, and provide evidence that individuals care about both how policy alternatives affect their own interests and how they influence the welfare of others relative to themselves.

In this article we use an original data set to provide the first empirical analysis of the political economy of inherited wealth taxation that covers a significant number of countries and a long time frame (1816–2000). Our goal is to understand why, if inheritance taxes are often very old taxes, the implementation of inheritance tax rates significant enough to affect wealth inequality is a much more recent phenomenon. We hypothesize alternatively that significant taxation of inherited wealth depended on (1) the extension of the suffrage and (2) political conditions created by mass mobilization for war. Using a difference-in-differences framework for identification, we find little evidence for the suffrage hypothesis but very strong evidence for the mass mobilization hypothesis. Our study has implications for understanding the evolution of wealth inequality and the political conditions under which countries are likely to implement policies that significantly redistribute wealth and income.