IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/7649.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Horizontal Equity: New Measures, Unclear Principles

Author

Listed:
  • Louis Kaplow

Abstract

Alan Auerbach and Kevin Hassett offer a new measure of horizontal equity (HE) that is designed to overcome deficiencies in prior indexes. There is, however, a fundamental problem that their effort shares with their predecessors' attempts: the underlying rationale for pursuing HE at the expense of individuals' well-being is never stated. Moreover, as discussed here, it appears that no plausible rationale can be given because the essence of HE involves giving weight to morally arbitrary factors. Indeed, pursuing HE may even conflict with the Pareto principle. On reflection, it seems that the appeal of HE is specious: HE does not possess intrinsic value, but rather is a rough proxy concept that may signal various ways in which unequal treatment of individuals can lead to a loss in social welfare. Unfortunately, HE indexes are not very useful even with regard to HE's proxy role.

Suggested Citation

  • Louis Kaplow, 2000. "Horizontal Equity: New Measures, Unclear Principles," NBER Working Papers 7649, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:7649
    Note: PE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w7649.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Kaplow, Louis, 1995. "A Fundamental Objection to Tax Equity Norms: A Call for Utilitarianism," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association, vol. 48(4), pages 497-514, December.
    2. Musgrave, Richard A., 1990. "Horizontal Equity, Once More," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association, vol. 43(2), pages 113-22, June.
    3. Kaplow, Louis, 1995. "A Fundamental Objection to Tax Equity Norms: A Call for Utilitarianism," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association;National Tax Journal, vol. 48(4), pages 497-514, December.
    4. Kaplow, Louis, 1996. "How Tax Complexity and Enforcement Affect the Equity and Efficiency of the Income Tax," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association;National Tax Journal, vol. 49(1), pages 135-150, March.
    5. Alan J. Auerbach & Kevin A. Hassett, 2002. "A New Measure of Horizontal Equity," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 92(4), pages 1116-1125, September.
    6. Kaplow, Louis, 1989. "Horizontal Equity: Measures in Search of a Principle," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association;National Tax Journal, vol. 42(2), pages 139-154, June.
    7. Musgrave, Richard A., 1990. "Horizontal Equity, Once More," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association;National Tax Journal, vol. 43(2), pages 113-122, June.
    8. Louis Kaplow & Steven Shavell, 1999. "Any Non-Individualistic Social Welfare Function Violates the Pareto Principle," NBER Working Papers 7051, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    9. Louis Kaplow, 1995. "How Tax Complexity and Enforcement Affect the Equity and Efficiency of The Income Tax," NBER Working Papers 5391, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    10. Kaplow, Louis, 1989. "Horizontal Equity: Measures in Search of a Principle," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association, vol. 42(2), pages 139-54, June.
    11. John C. Harsanyi, 1953. "Cardinal Utility in Welfare Economics and in the Theory of Risk-taking," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 61(5), pages 434-434.
    12. Feldstein, Martin, 1976. "On the theory of tax reform," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 6(1-2), pages 77-104.
    13. Kaplow, Louis, 1996. " Optimal Distribution and the Family," Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 98(1), pages 75-92, March.
    14. Louis Kaplow, 1985. "Horizontal Equity: Measures in Search of a Principle," NBER Working Papers 1679, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    15. Kaplow, Louis, 1996. "How Tax Complexity and Enforcement Affect the Equity and Efficiency of the Income Tax," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association, vol. 49(1), pages 135-50, March.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. William A Pizer & Steven Sexton, 2019. "The Distributional Impacts of Energy Taxes," Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 13(1), pages 104-123.
    2. Eissa, Nada & Hoynes, Hilary Williamson, 2000. "Explaining the Fall and Rise in the Tax Cost of Marriage: The Effect of Tax Laws and Demographic Trends, 1984-97," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association, vol. 53(n. 3), pages 683-712, September.
    3. Henrik Jordahl & Luca Micheletto, 2005. "Optimal Utilitarian Taxation and Horizontal Equity," Journal of Public Economic Theory, Association for Public Economic Theory, vol. 7(4), pages 681-708, October.
    4. Hans Gersbach & Volker Hahn & Stephan Imhof, 2013. "Tax rules," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 41(1), pages 19-42, June.
    5. James Alm & Sally Wallace, 2007. "Are Jamaica’s Direct Taxes on Labor “Fair†?," Public Finance Review, , vol. 35(1), pages 83-102, January.
    6. Jean‐Yves Duclos, 2006. "Innis Lecture: Equity and equality," Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d'économique, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 39(4), pages 1073-1104, November.
    7. Sören Blomquist & Luca Micheletto, 2008. "Age‐related Optimal Income Taxation," Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 110(1), pages 45-71, March.
    8. Erlend Bø & Peter Lambert & Thor Thoresen, 2012. "Horizontal inequity under a dual income tax system: principles and measurement," International Tax and Public Finance, Springer;International Institute of Public Finance, vol. 19(5), pages 625-640, October.
    9. Jeffrey B. Liebman & Daniel Ramsey, 2019. "Independent Taxation, Horizontal Equity, and Return-Free Filing," NBER Chapters, in: Tax Policy and the Economy, Volume 33, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    10. Thomas Douenne, 2018. "The vertical and horizontal distributive effects of energy taxes," Policy Papers 2018.05, FAERE - French Association of Environmental and Resource Economists.
    11. Ivica Urban, 2009. "Kakwani decomposition of redistributive effect: Origins, critics and upgrades," Working Papers 148, ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality.
    12. Gerlinde Verbist & Wim Van Lancker, 2016. "Horizontal and Vertical Equity Objectives of Child Benefit Systems: An Empirical Assessment for European Countries," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 128(3), pages 1299-1318, September.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Duclos, Jean-Yves & Jalbert, Vincent & Araar, Abdelkrim, 2000. "Classical Horizontal Inequity and Reranking: an Integrated Approach," Cahiers de recherche 0002, Université Laval - Département d'économique.
    2. Jean‐Yves Duclos, 2006. "Innis Lecture: Equity and equality," Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d'économique, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 39(4), pages 1073-1104, November.
    3. Bibi, Sami & Duclos, Jean-Yves, 2007. "Equity and policy effectiveness with imperfect targeting," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 83(1), pages 109-140, May.
    4. Louis Kaplow, 2003. "Transition Policy: A Conceptual Framework," NBER Working Papers 9596, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    5. Duclos, Jean-Yves & Jalbert, Vincent & Araar, Abdelkrim, 2003. "Classical Horizontal Inequity and Reranking: an Integrating Approach," Cahiers de recherche 0306, CIRPEE.
    6. Henrik Jordahl & Luca Micheletto, 2005. "Optimal Utilitarian Taxation and Horizontal Equity," Journal of Public Economic Theory, Association for Public Economic Theory, vol. 7(4), pages 681-708, October.
    7. Erlend Bø & Peter Lambert & Thor Thoresen, 2012. "Horizontal inequity under a dual income tax system: principles and measurement," International Tax and Public Finance, Springer;International Institute of Public Finance, vol. 19(5), pages 625-640, October.
    8. Louis Kaplow, 2020. "A Unified Perspective on Efficiency, Redistribution, and Public Policy," NBER Working Papers 26683, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    9. Duclos, Jean-Yves, 1998. "Social evaluation functions, economic isolation and the Suits index of progressivity," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 69(1), pages 103-121, July.
    10. Duclos, J.Y., 1995. "Economic Isolation, Inequality, and the Suits Index of Progressivity," Papers 9510, Laval - Recherche en Politique Economique.
    11. Berliant, Marcus & Strauss, Robert P., 2008. "Distributional analysis of prospective 2009 US individual income taxes: current law and the candidates’ tax plans," MPRA Paper 11221, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    12. Lambert, Peter J. & Yitzhaki, Shlomo, 1995. "Equity, equality and welfare," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 39(3-4), pages 674-682, April.
    13. Jean-Yves Duclos & Peter Lambert, "undated". "A Normative Approach to Measuring Classical Horizontal Inequity," Discussion Papers 97/3, Department of Economics, University of York.
    14. J. Richard Aronson & Peter J. Lambert & Donald R. Trippeer, 1999. "Estimates of the Changing Equity Characteristics of the U.S. Income Tax with International Conjectures," Public Finance Review, , vol. 27(2), pages 138-159, March.
    15. Hänsel, Martin C. & Franks, Max & Kalkuhl, Matthias & Edenhofer, Ottmar, 2022. "Optimal carbon taxation and horizontal equity: A welfare-theoretic approach with application to German household data," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 116(C).
    16. Jean-Yves Duclos, 2006. "Equity and Equality," Cahiers de recherche 0629, CIRPEE.
    17. Cornelissen, Thomas & Himmler, Oliver & Koenig, Tobias, 2013. "Fairness spillovers—The case of taxation," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 90(C), pages 164-180.
    18. Alan J. Auerbach & Kevin A. Hassett, 2002. "A New Measure of Horizontal Equity," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 92(4), pages 1116-1125, September.
    19. Louis Kaplow, 1995. "How Tax Complexity and Enforcement Affect the Equity and Efficiency of The Income Tax," NBER Working Papers 5391, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    20. Gerdtham, Ulf-G. & Sundberg, Gun, 1996. "Redistributive Effects of the Swedish Health Care Financing System," SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance 115, Stockholm School of Economics.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
    • H23 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Externalities; Redistributive Effects; Environmental Taxes and Subsidies

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:7649. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.