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Lobbying, Family Concerns, and the Lack of Political Support for Estate Taxation

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  • Philippe De Donder
  • Pierre Pestieau

Abstract

type="main" xml:id="ecpo12062-abs-0001"> We provide an explanation for why estate taxation is surprisingly little used, given the skewness of the estate distribution. Taxing estates implies meddling with intra-family decisions, which is frown upon by many. At the same time, given the concentration of estates a small proportion of the population stands to gain a lot by decreasing estate taxation. We provide an analytical model, together with numerical simulations, where agents bequeathing large estates make monetary contributions to play up the salience of the encroachment aspects of estate taxation on family decisions and to decrease its political support.

Suggested Citation

  • Philippe De Donder & Pierre Pestieau, 2015. "Lobbying, Family Concerns, and the Lack of Political Support for Estate Taxation," Economics and Politics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 27(3), pages 389-403, November.
  • Handle: RePEc:bla:ecopol:v:27:y:2015:i:3:p:389-403
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    Cited by:

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    2. KORNEK, Urik & LESSMANN, Kai & TULKENS, Henry, 2014. "Transferable and non transferable utility implementations of coalitional stability in integrated assessment models," LIDAM Discussion Papers CORE 2014035, Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE).
    3. NESTEROV, Yu. & SHIKHMAN, Vladimir, 2014. "Convergent subgradient methods for nonsmooth convex minimization," LIDAM Discussion Papers CORE 2014005, Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE).
    4. YATSENKO, Yuri & HRITONENKO, Natali & BRECHET, Thierry, 2014. "Modeling of environmental adaptation versus pollution mitigation," LIDAM Discussion Papers CORE 2014006, Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE).
    5. DASH, Sanjeeb & GÜNLÜK, Oktay & WOLSEY, Laurence A., 2014. "The continuous knapsack set," LIDAM Discussion Papers CORE 2014007, Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE).

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    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
    • H31 - Public Economics - - Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents - - - Household

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