The Revealed Social Welfare Function: USA X Brazil

Enlinson Mattos

Brazilian Review of Econometrics, 2008, vol. 28, issue 2

Abstract: This paper proposes the use of the optimal nonlinear tax formula to derive the social welfare function of policymakers. In particular, it uses PSID and PNAD for 1990 to estimate the implicit social welfare functions associated with income tax imposition for the USA and Brazil. Under assumptions on the household preferences, the estimations suggest that both U.S. and Brazilian social welfare functions are concave and Paretian, but that only the Brazilian function is utilitarian, i.e., the Brazilian social planner is less inequity-averse than her U.S. counterpart.

Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://periodicos.fgv.br/bre/article/view/1509 (text/html)

Related works:
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:sbe:breart:v:28:y:2008:i:2:a:1509

Access Statistics for this article

Brazilian Review of Econometrics is currently edited by Daniel Monte

More articles in Brazilian Review of Econometrics from Sociedade Brasileira de Econometria - SBE Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Núcleo de Computação da FGV EPGE ().