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This chapter explains why inframarginal analysis should be used to evaluate whether to enforce consumer boilerplate provisions, and then applies this approach to show that the use of pro-consumer boilerplate terms should be mandatory. Inframarginal analysis looks at how the law can allocate inframarginal resources in ways that are fairer and more efficient than unregulated outcomes. Two policy considerations are paramount when carrying out this analysis: 1) devising ways to distribute resources equitably, and 2) minimizing wasteful competition. The impact of consumer boilerplate is largely inframarginal, so inframarginal analysis is the correct way to evaluate whether to enforce these provisions. In carrying out this analysis, a graph-based approach is helpful in showing why equitable considerations point toward preferring pro-consumer terms over pro-seller terms and why wasteful competition considerations point toward making the use of these pro-consumer terms mandatory. The usefulness of this analysis is further demonstrated by applying the findings here to the more specific question of whether to enforce choice-of-forum provisions in consumer contracts.
Since the Reagan era, American economic policy has amounted to self-colonization. Democratic majorities have consistently supported legal regimes that have enabled corporations to extract the lion’s share of the gains from trade from the public. For example, they have supported a corporate law regime that denies the public democratic control over the behavior of corporations and instead gives dictatorial powers to shareholders and managers. The Internet has made it even easier for firms to extract surpluses from consumers through surveillance and algorithmic pricing. One small contribution toward a project of decolonizing the public would be for consumers to obtain a property right in their personal information. This would allow them to claw back some of the surpluses that technology has taken from them.
Land is a major generator of gains from trade because it is fixed in quantity and arises naturally, resulting in low costs for sellers and high demand from buyers. The fixed quantity also allows policymakers to tailor prices or taxes to inframarginal units. But the current mode of redistributing the surpluses generated by land sales in America – the local property tax – has important drawbacks. These include the need for property value assessments, the fact that some homeowners lack the cash income required to pay the tax even when the assessment is accurate, and the fact that local administration means there is little redistribution from rich communities to poor ones. Taxing imputed rents as income at the federal level would address these problems. Imputed rent is the rent that a homeowner pays to himself for the right to live in the house. It is economically equivalent to a home’s value because home values are determined by the rents they command. Taxing them as federal income does not require home value assessments (local rental data suffice), ensures that tax rates vary with income, and leverages the mildly progressive federal income tax rate structure to redistribute wealth.
Over the past fifteen years, there has been a growing interest in altering legal rules to redistribute wealth, with many scholars believing that neoclassical economic theory is biased against redistribution. Yet a growing number of progressive scholars are pushing back against this view. Toward an Inframarginal Revolution offers a fresh perspective on the redistribution of wealth by legal scholars who argue that the neoclassical concept of the gains from trade provides broad latitude for redistribution that will not harm efficiency. They show how policymakers can redistribute wealth via taxation, price regulation, antitrust, consumer law, and contract law by focusing on the prices at which inframarginal units of production change hands. Progressive and eye-opening, this volume uses conservative economic concepts to make a compelling case for radically redistributing wealth. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available open access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.
In meritocratic societies, inequality is considered just if it reflects factors within but not outside individuals’ control. However, individuals often benefit differentially from other people’s efforts. Such passive inequality is simultaneously just and unjust by meritocratic standards, confronting meritocrats with a dilemma. We conducted an experiment with a representative US sample to investigate how people deal with this dilemma. In the experiment, impartial spectators redistribute payments between pairs of individuals. We vary whether initial payments result from luck or effort and whether spectators redistribute between individuals who worked themselves or individuals who benefited from the work of real-life friends. We find that spectators treat inequality based on the efforts of individuals’ friends as if individuals had worked themselves, and very different from inequality resulting from differential luck. This indicates that most people accept inequality if it is merited at some stage, which may explain opposition to redistributive policies.
Focusing on the same period as Chapter 2, Chapter 3 treats economic history. It engages with recent historiographical debates regarding the late medieval economy, especially as those debates pertain to Catalonia. This chapter argues for a keenly felt decline, perceived by contemporaries and corroborated by the best available quantitative evidence, in the dominant sector of Perpignan’s economy, namely, cloth manufacturing. This chapter also argues for a surprising similarity in the Nou regiment’s and the Nova forma’s economic policies. Notwithstanding their different social profiles, both regimes sought to revive production and prosperity through traditional protectionism and anti-fraud regulation. This chapter argues that the surprising similarities in the regimes’ economic policies, and their inability to match the inventiveness displayed in matters of municipal government, reflect the power of cultural assumptions so deeply rooted that the desire for newness could not prevail against them: that production and prosperity were functions of honour; and that the greatest source of dishonour was fraud, which the town aspired to stamp out.
This chapter explores the priestly theology of space within the tabernacle and how this expands to the holy land where Israel will dwell. The tabernacle and God’s abiding presence are the center of all holiness for the priestly authors. Only ordained priests may approach his holiness. The consecration of the altar is a high point in the theology of Leviticus and has an impact on its theology of the land and the Jubilee.
Longevity risk is threatening the sustainability of traditional pension systems. To deal with this issue, decumulation strategies alternative to annuities have been proposed in the literature. However, heterogeneity in mortality experiences in the pool of policyholders due to socio-economic classes generates inequity, because of implicit wealth transfers from the more disadvantaged to the wealthier classes. We address this issue in a Group Self-Annuitization (GSA) scheme in the presence of stochastic mortality by proposing a redistributive GSA scheme where benefits are optimally shared across classes. The expected present values of the benefits in a standard GSA scheme show relevant gaps across socio-economic groups, which are reduced in the redistributive GSA scheme. We explore sensitivity to pool size, interest rates and mortality assumptions.
In this article, I defend and expand on what I call the republican view of the Kantian state’s duty to the poor. Against minimalist sceptics, I argue that the republican view makes a compelling case for the state’s duty with conceptual resources internal to Kant’s philosophy of right. Against maximalist critics, I argue that the republican view need not limit redistribution to poverty relief and that it provides resources to overcome an important interpretative challenge facing attempts at justifying more expansive redistribution on Kantian grounds.
Throughout this themed section we have examined a number of key social policy challenges in relation to the role that taxation measures and choices play, or can play, in shaping responses to them. The following is a list of learning and research resources on topics that are central to these themes. For the most part, we have focused on recently published contributions.
This article problematises two concepts frequently used in debates about resource allocation.
The term ‘system’ evokes a ‘unified whole’ and emphasises interaction among the different component parts within the system. However, the notion of a tax system insulated from the world around it obstructs an analysis of the ways in which interactions of tax arrangements with other elements of society shape distributional outcomes. The article argues that tax arrangements need to be understood as an open system.
Next, the article problematises the concept of ‘redistribution’ by examining the limitations of current approaches to redistribution. First, pre-distribution, referring to decisions about tax expenditures, is often overlooked, although it reflects allocation decisions that not only benefit recipients but also result in foregone revenues that might have been used for redistribution. Second, analyses of redistribution often focus exclusively on income. Third, taxes shape the kind of society we have in ways that limit future possibilities of redistribution. The article proposes the concept of structural redistribution to denote redistribution, which goes beyond redistribution among groups to change the nature of society.
We examine how taxes impact charitable giving and how this relationship is affected by the degree of wasteful government spending. In our model, individuals make donations to charities knowing that the government collects a flat-rate tax on income (net of charitable donations) and redistributes part of the tax revenue. The rest of the tax revenue is wasted. The model predicts that a higher tax rate increases charitable donations. Surprisingly, the model shows that a higher degree of waste decreases donations (when the elasticity of marginal utility with respect to consumption is high enough). We test the model’s predictions using a laboratory experiment with actual donations to charities and find that the tax rate has an insignificant effect on giving. The degree of waste, however, has a large, negative and highly significant effect on giving.
We study the distributional preferences of Americans during 2013–2016, a period of social and economic upheaval. We decompose preferences into two qualitatively different tradeoffs—fair-mindedness versus self-interest, and equality versus efficiency—and measure both at the individual level in a large and diverse sample. Although Americans are heterogeneous in terms of both fair-mindedness and equality-efficiency orientation, we find that the individual-level preferences in 2013 are highly predictive of those in 2016. Subjects that experienced an increase in household income became more self-interested, and those who voted for Democratic presidential candidates in both 2012 and 2016 became more equality-oriented.
We perform an experiment which provides a laboratory replica of some important features of the welfare state. In the experiment, all individuals in a group decide whether to make a costly effort, which produces a random (independent) outcome for each one of them. The group members then vote on whether to redistribute the resulting and commonly known total sum of earnings equally amongst themselves. This game has two equilibria, if played once. In one of them, all players make effort and there is little redistribution. In the other one, there is no effort and nothing to redistribute. A solution to the repeated game allows for redistribution and high effort, sustained by the threat to revert to the worst of these equilibria. Our results show that redistribution with high effort is not sustainable. The main reason for the absence of redistribution is that rich agents do not act differently depending on whether the poor have worked hard or not. The equilibrium in which redistribution may be sustained by the threat of punishing the poor if they do not exert effort is not observed in the experiment. Thus, the explanation of the behavior of the subjects lies in Hobbes, not in Rousseau.
Previous literature demonstrates that beliefs about the determinants of income inequality play a major role in individual support for income redistribution. This study investigates how people form beliefs regarding the extent to which work versus luck determines income inequality. Specifically, I examine whether people form self-serving beliefs to justify supporting personally advantageous redistributive policies. I use a laboratory experiment where I directly measure beliefs and manipulate the incentives to engage in self-deception. I first replicate earlier results demonstrating that (1) people attribute income inequality to work when they receive a high income and to luck when they receive a low income and (2) their beliefs about the source of income inequality influence their preferences over redistributive policies. However, I do not find that people’s beliefs about the causes of income inequality are further influenced by self-serving motivations based on a desire to justify favorable redistributive policies. I conclude that, in my experiment, self-serving beliefs about the causes of income inequality are driven primarily by overconfidence and self-image concerns and not to justify favorable redistributive policies.
We report experimental evidence showing a positive effect of redistribution on economic efficiency via the self-enforcement of property rights, and identify which status groups benefit more and which less. We model an economy in which wealth is produced if players voluntarily comply with the—efficient but inequitable—prevailing social order. We vary exogenously whether redistribution is feasible, and how it is organized. We find that redistribution benefits all status groups as property disputes recede. It is most effective when transfers are not discretionary but instead imposed by some exogenous administration. In the absence of coercive means to enforce property rights, it is the higher status groups, not the lower status groups, who benefit from redistribution being compulsory rather than voluntary.
The impact of redistributive policies on voluntary contributions is still not well understood. While a higher level of redistributive taxation decreases the price of voluntary giving, it also changes the income distribution by decreasing income inequality. This paper provides a controlled laboratory experiment to investigate the net impact of the tax rate on public goods provision. The experimental findings show that while the participants decrease their voluntary contributions as the pre-tax income distribution becomes more equal, they increase their contributions with taxation. These findings have important implications for government policies regarding privately provided public goods.
Liberals experience more distress than conservatives. Why? We offer a novel explanation, the social support hypothesis. Maintaining social support and avoiding exclusion are basic human motivations, but people differ in their sensitivity to the threat of social exclusion. Among people high in the personality trait neuroticism, exclusion easily triggers feelings of vulnerability and neediness. The social support hypothesis translates this to politics. Concerned with their own vulnerability, we find that neurotic people prefer policies of care – social welfare and redistribution – but not other left-wing policies. Specifically, it is anxiety – the facet of neuroticism tapping sensitivity to social threats – that drives this link. And it is only for people experiencing exclusion that anxiety predicts support for social welfare. Our results come from two experiments and four representative surveys across two continents. They help to resolve the puzzle of liberal distress while providing a new template for research on personality and politics.