Peter J. Lambert () (Department of Economics, University of Oregon) Helen T. Naughton (Department of Economics, University of Oregon)
Abstract
What does an equal sacrifice tax look like in the case of a rank-dependent social welfare function? One's tax liability evidently becomes a function of one's income and one's position in the distribution in such a case, but not much else appears to be known. (Menahem Yaari touched upon the issue in his paper "A controversial proposal concerning inequality measurement", Journal of Economic Theory 1988, but focused only on a poll tax). In this paper, we determine the properties of the equal sacrifice tax for a wide class of rank-dependent social welfare functions, and integrate the theory with that already available for the class of utilitarian social welfare functions. In an additional step, we analyze the equal sacrifice tax for a class of mixed utilitarian and rank-dependent social welfare functions, and finally we review what this synthesis has achieved.
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Publisher Info
Paper provided by ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality in its series Working Papers with number
45.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Shorrocks, Anthony F, 1983.
"Ranking Income Distributions,"
Economica,
London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 50(197), pages 3-17, February.
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