Political preferences for redistribution in Sweden

Spencer Bastani and Jacob Lundberg

The Journal of Economic Inequality, 2017, vol. 15, issue 4, No 4, 345-367

Abstract: Abstract We examine preferences for redistribution inherent in Swedish tax policy during 1971–2012 using the inverse optimal tax approach. The income distribution is carefully characterized with the help of administrative register data, and we employ behavioral elasticities reflecting the perceived distortionary effects of taxation. The revealed social welfare weights are high for non-workers, small for low-income earners, and hump-shaped around the median. At the top, they are always negative, especially so during the high-tax years of the 1970s and ’80s. The weights on non-workers increased sharply in the 1970s, fell drastically in the late ’80s and early ’90s, and have since then increased.

Keywords: Redistribution; Social welfare weights; Optimal taxation; Inverse optimal taxation; Social preferences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10888-017-9368-4 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Journal Article: Political preferences for redistribution in Sweden (2017)
Working Paper: Political Preferences for Redistribution in Sweden (2016)
Working Paper: Political preferences for redistribution in Sweden (2016)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:jecinq:v:15:y:2017:i:4:d:10.1007_s10888-017-9368-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... th/journal/10888/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10888-017-9368-4

Access Statistics for this article

The Journal of Economic Inequality is currently edited by Stephen Jenkins

More articles in The Journal of Economic Inequality from Springer, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().