A New Measurement of Tax Progressivity

There have been some studies on the measurement of tax progressivity since the innovative works of Suits (1977) and Kakwani (1977). These measurements essentially rely on the idea of the Lorenz distribution of income and tax burden and the Gini concentration of inequality. Instead of such a traditional idea, this paper proposes a new measure of tax progressivity based on the relative volatility of tax revenue vis-a-vis income. The advantage of our approach is to make it possible to assess the degree of tax progressivity and to do international comparisons without any specific information about the distribution of the income and tax burden. All we need is macro data, which is a lot easier to obtain than micro data. This paper also discusses some international comparisons using the new measurement.departmental bulletin pape

Vote buying or (political) business (cycles) as usual?

We study the short-run effect of elections on monetary aggregates in a sample of 85 low and middle income democracies (1975-2009). We find an increase in the growth rate of M1 during election months of about one tenth of a standard deviation. A similar effect can neither be detected in established OECD democracies nor in other months. The effect is larger in democracies with many poor and uneducated voters, and in Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and in East-Asia and the Pacific. We argue that the election month monetary expansion is related to systemic vote buying which requires significant amounts of cash to be disbursed right before elections. The finely timed increase in M1 is consistent with this; is inconsistent with a monetary cycle aimed at creating an election time boom; and it cannot be, fully, accounted for by alternative explanations