Preferences for Taxing Personal Characteristics
(with Julien Senn)
Draft coming soon
Tagging—the conditioning of taxes on income and personal characteristics correlated with earning ability—can improve efficiency. However, its social acceptability remains uncertain, as it may conflict with horizontal equity, the principle that "equals" should be treated equally. We study citizens' support for tagging in an online vignette experiment with the U.S. general population (N=3012). Our experiment manipulates three theoretically relevant features of tags: immutability, correlation with ability, and correlation with needs. We find that tags correlated with ability and needs receive higher support, consistent with the prescriptions from optimal tax theory, while immutability does not significantly predict support, contrasting the prescriptions from theory. Fairness concerns are the strongest predictors of support across treatments and individuals, while concerns about efficiency, scope of government, and implementation play a smaller role. Finally, we synthesize insights from theory, our experiment, and practice.
Who Should Get Money? Estimating Welfare Weights in the U.S.
(with Francesco Capozza)
Reject and Resubmit at the American Economic Review
Awards: Distinguished CESifo affiliate award for best paper in Public Economics 2024
Paper (new version)
Fair (P)redistribution
(with Justin Valasek and
Weijia Wang )
Reject and Resubmit at the Journal of Public Economics
Science by Consensus: Eliciting Citizens' R&D Spending Priorities
(with Francesco Capozza and
Mattie Toma)
Paper
Policy brief
Paternalism: Determinants of Demand and Supply
(with Björn Bartling )
Paper