Income tax schedule and redistribution in direct democracies – the Swiss case

Mario Morger () and Christoph Schaltegger
Additional contact information
Mario Morger: Center for Labor and Social Policy Studies BASS

The Journal of Economic Inequality, 2018, vol. 16, issue 3, No 5, 413-438

Abstract: Abstract This study examines redistribution policy through personal income taxes in Swiss cantons over the period 1995–2011. In a first step, redistribution measures are estimated with the help of exhaustive administrative data. Redistribution is decomposed into average tax rate and tax progression. In a second step, we investigate the impact of direct democratic institutions and their usage on tax policy and redistribution. The results suggest that the effect of direct democracy on income tax redistribution is a multilayered process. First, the theoretical availability of direct democracy tools does not seem to have the same impact as the effective use of them. Second, fiscal referendums may – in the short term –reduce redistribution through lower tax rates and lead to less tax progression. Third, an increasing number of ballots on initiatives leads to more tax progression and more redistribution in the long run. It seems that the short-term dampening effects of fiscal referendums on redistribution may be overridden in the long run by the expansive effect of popular initiatives.

Keywords: Direct democracy; Income redistribution; Spatial econometrics; Tax competition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10888-018-9376-z Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Journal Article: Income tax schedule and redistribution in direct democracies – the Swiss case (2018)
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:16:y:2018:i:3:d:10.1007_s10888-018-9376-z

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

DOI: 10.1007/s10888-018-9376-z

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 ().