working wives and major family expenditures replication and extension this paper updates and replicates an earlier study comparing purchases by working wives employed outside the home and nonworking wives and the amounts spent for time saving durables other durables and hobby and recreation items using a 1977 data base similar to one gathered a decade earlier wife s labor force behavior was again found not to be significantly related to either purchase or expenditure decisions for time saving durables when income stage of life cycle and other situational variables were held constant

the democratic political economy of progressive income taxation why do both left and right political parties typically propose progressive income taxation schemes in political competition analysis of this problem has been hindered by the two dimensionality of the issue space to give parties a choice over a domain that contains both progressive and regressive income tax policies requires an issue space that is at least two dimensional nash equilibrium in pure strategies of the standard two party game whose players have complete preferences over a two dimensional policy space generically fails to exist i introduce a new equilibrium concept for political games based on the fact of factional conflict within parties each party is supposed to consist of reformists militants and opportunists each faction has a complete preference order on policy space but together they can only agree on a partial order nash equilibria of the two party game where the policy space consists of all quadratic income tax functions and each party is represented by its partial order exist and it is shown that in such equilibria both parties propose progressive income taxation

female labor force participation and time saving household technology a case study of the microwave from 1978 to 1989 american households are facing severe time constraints as women increase their participation in the wage economy the implications of this situation for the adoption of time saving technology in the home are not well understood previous research suggests several scenarios regarding the consequences of female labor force participation for the purchase of time saving technology 1 there may be no effect 2 female labor force participation may have a direct effect 3 female labor force participation may have an indirect effect through income or 4 direct effects emerge over time this article evaluates these hypotheses with a case study of the microwave oven through proprietary cross sectional surveys of married couple households conducted from 1978 to 1989

grouping durable goods modelling consumer preferences has a long history of interest in the literature several approaches that have been proposed consider consumer behaviour to be hierarchical products are divided into groups and preferences within a group are modelled independently an important question that arises in these efforts concerns the development of appropriate higher level groups this paper replicates and extends an earlier study by pickering et al 1973 in which product groups were developed based on consumer perceptions of product attributes we collect survey data perceived product attributes and similarity ratings for a set of durable products multiple measures are thus used to test the stability and consistency of product groups a matrix of product similarity values is constructed for each of these two survey based measures cluster analysis is then performed to develop a grouping scheme for these durable goods althought differences are observed the product composition of the resulting product groups a

fairness self interest and the politics of the progressive income tax all advanced democracies have adopted income taxes with considerable progression in marginal tax rates to explain this we examine the nature of individual and collective preferences over alternative tax schedules in the context of a simple two sector model we first consider the case of altruistic or sociotropic citizens who view the income tax as a means of achieving a fairer or more egalitarian distribution of income we show that greater marginal rate progressivity may well be less fair that a fairest tax however defined is always a linear or flat rate schedule in which all incomes are taxed at the same marginal rate and that with a purely sociotropic electorate there exists a flat rate schedule which is a majority equilibrium we then show that with self interested voters who seek to minimize their own tax burdens greater marginal rate progression may well be preferred by middle and upper income voters that for middle income citizens the optimal schedule is a sharply progressive one and that within the set of individually optimal schedules there exists a majority equilibrium which is a progressive schedule which minimizes the burden on median income or middle class citizens at the expense of lower and upper income taxpayers

representative democracy and marginal rate progressive income taxation abstract this paper develops a political economy model that is consistent with the fact that democracies have a preference for increasing marginal tax rates on income we present a model in which there is an exogenous set of political parties with preferences over the set of admissible tax schedules this set contains virtually any increasing and piecewise linear continuous function each party decides whether or not to present a candidate for election there is a fixed cost of running the elected candidate implements one of her preferred tax policies our main results provide conditions under which a strong nash equilibrium exists and a tax schedule with increasing marginal tax rates is implemented in some nash equilibria and in any strong nash equilibrium

is there a demand for income tax progressivity recently marhuenda and ortuno ortin economics letters 48 1995 319 have provided a popular support for progressivity theorem that says that a marginal progressive tax always defeats a marginal regressive tax as long as individuals vote for the tax scheme minimizing their tax liabilities and the median income is less than the mean income in this paper we provide under similar circumstances a popular support for regressivity theorem according to which for any existing tax scheme there is always a majority support for a regressive reform reducing marginal progressivity or increasing marginal regressivity this regressive reform is supported by both extremes of the income distribution combining this result with marhuenda and ortuno ortin s result implies that vote cycling between regressive and progressive tax reform is inevitable and thus that the demand for progressivity cannot be established in the standard downsian framework with self interested voters

on the optimal income taxation some further numerical results abstract using numerical calculations we show in the optimal income tax model that a realistic value for the elasticity of substitution between consumption and leisure 0 5 leads to conclusions different from some of those drawn by mirrlees 1971 and atkinson 1973 the marginal tax rates are not so low and the shape of the tax schedule is for a great majority of the population substantially nonlinear a new feature in our calculations is that both results come out without going to maximin as done by atkinson 1973 we study in special cases the locality of the zero limit of the marginal tax rate at the upper end of the ability distribution and we achieve a very definite conclusion this result is really very local we also present an interesting approximation result concerning the relationship between the level of the government revenue and the marginal tax rate for individuals with high ability an important methodological remark analogous to sen s critique on the ethical measures of inequality is made on the interpretation of optimal income tax calculations

majority support for progressive income taxation with corner preferences this paper studies voting over quadratic taxation when incomeis fixed and taxation non distortionary the set of feasibletaxes is compact and self interested voters have cornerpreferences we first show that if a majority winning taxpolicy exists it involves maximum progressivity we then givea necessary and sufficient condition on the incomedistribution for a majority winner to exist this conditionappears to be satisfied for a large class of distributionfunctions

consumption durables exploring the order of acquisition after an overview of alternative methods for analysing the ownership of consumer durables a particular method is proposed drawn from the principles of social choice theory and ultimately leading to the method of ranking durables equivalent to the borda rule methods are also developed for calculating the uniformity of choice and for identifying differences in patterns of ownership across partitions of the sample

popular support for progressive taxation and the relative income hypothesis abstract we show that a marginal rate progressive tax always defeats a marginal rate regressive tax under pairwise majority voting so long as the latter collects at least as much revenue as the former one irrespective of whether the voters care at all about their relative incomes or not

voting over selfishly optimal nonlinear income tax schedules abstract majority voting over selfishly optimal nonlinear income tax schedules proposed by a continuum of individuals who have quasilinear in consumption preferences is considered roell 2012 has shown that individual preferences over these schedules are single peaked in this article a complete characterization of selfishly optimal schedules is provided each selfishly optimal schedule has a bunching region in a neighborhood of the proposer s skill type coincides with the maxi max schedule below this region and coincides with the maxi min schedule above it using techniques introduced by vincent and mason 1967 the bunching region is identified by solving an unconstrained optimization problem information about the optimal schedules is used to provide a relatively simple proof of single peakedness the condorcet winning tax schedule features marginal tax rates that are negative resp positive on the maxi max resp maxi min part of the schedule except at the endpoints of the skill distribution where they are zero

the politics of progressive income taxation with incentive effects this paper studies majority voting over quadratic taxation and investigates under which conditions marginal progressivity emerges as a voting outcome in our model with endogenous income there is no majority condorcet winning tax schedule we then investigate less demanding political equilibrium concepts in order to see under which conditions the set of equilibria is composed only of progressive tax functions we follow three strategies i reduction of the policy space to the tax functions that are ideal for some voter ii elimination of weakly dominated strategies and the use of mixed strategies in a standard downsian two party competition game iii assumption that political parties interact repeatedly and care about the size of their majority although each approach captures a different aspect of political behavior they point to the same simulation based conclusion that progressivity is more likely to emerge for most distributions of abilities and that it is actually the only possible voting outcome if the distribution is sufficiently concentrated at the middle

popular support for progressive taxation abstract the popular support obtained by two parties who propose two qualitatively different tax schemes is analyzed we show that if the median voter is below the mean then any progressive proposal wins over a regressive one

income taxation uncertainty and stability abstract this paper develops a political model to analyze the stability of income tax schedules it is assumed that agents perceive any proposed alternative tax policy as more uncertain than the status quo a tax policy is stable if it is a condorcet winner it is well known that in a model without uncertainty the existence of such a policy is very rare we show however that in real cases this might not be a serious problem since small amounts of uncertainty can bring stability to the status quo it is also shown that linear tax functions can only be stable in economies with very egalitarian income distributions and high taxation levels

durables and wives employment yet again the literature examining the relationship between consumer durables expenditures and wives employment is analyzed several deficiencies in the literature are corrected in a revised model that is estimated with data from the 1977 1978 survey of consumer expenditures this article concludes that durables expenditures and wives employment time are complements

public provision of private goods government may provide a good that can if legally permitted be supplemented by private purchases policy is determined by majority rule under standard assumptions on preferences a majority voting equilibrium exists a regime of positive government provision with no restriction on private supplements is shown to be majority preferred to a regime of either only market provision or only government provision combined public and private expenditure on the good is higher under this dual provision regime than under either of the alternatives under some preference configurations the median income voter is pivotal under others a voter with income below the median is pivotal

inequality the politics of redistribution and the tax mix political economy literature generally predicts a positive relationship between income inequality and redistribution however there is no clear empirical evidence supporting such a relationship by incorporating an informal sector that evades income taxes we account for the tax base effect that along with the political channel determines the equilibrium redistribution and tax mix we find a non monotonic relationship between inequality and redistribution and explore under which conditions an unequal society relies more heavily on indirect taxes to finance redistribution ultimately this paper shows the limitations of the income tax to finance redistribution in developing countries even when taxes are democratically chosen

wives labor force behavior and family consumption patterns in 1940 the labor force participation rate for married women husband present was 14 percent by 1970 it had increased 26 percentage points to 40 percent the supply and demand variables associated with this increase have been widely investigated however there has been ve ry little research on the economic effects of wives labor force participation see r agarwala and j drinkwater margaret carroll robert holbrook and frank stafford lucy mallan and jacob mincer this paper analyzes two economic effects the effect on the ratio of consumption to income ciy and the effect on the ratio of durable goods purchases to income durly the primary question addressed is controlling for total family income and several other variables what are the differences if any in the ratios of ciy and durly for working wife w w and nonworking wife n w w families looked at in another way the question may be rephrased how do w w families use wives income

the unexpected challenges of using energy intensity as a policy objective examining the debate over the apec energy intensity goal aims energy intensity energy demand per unit of economic output is one of the most widely used indicators of energy efficiency in energy policy discussions yet its application in real world policymaking can be surprisingly problematical this paper aims to provide guidance to governments and organizations considering using energy intensity as a policy objective scope in 2007 the apec community adopted then in 2011 revised an apec region wide energy intensity improvement goal this paper presents a case study of that experience focusing on three key lessons learned these lessons are not original findings however none of them have received the recognition they deserve and consequently they came as a surprise to many of those involved in apec s policy discussions conclusions the three lessons are as follows 1 energy intensity improvement is happening surprisingly quickly but not quickly enough to meet the world s energy challenges 2 it is difficult to find a definition of energy intensity that can make it suitable for use as an indicator of regional energy efficiency 3 whether the gdp s of individual economies are converted to common currency using market exchange rates or purchasing power parity ppp can dramatically change regional energy intensity improvement calculations