Christian Seidl

• Kiel University

Joseph Schumpeter was not a political theorist or constitutional lawyer. However, the essays in this volume show that reflecting on his brilliant insights and provocative exaggerations is stimulating in various ways. Schumpeter is concerned the coevolution of modern statehood and a capitalist market economy and their crisis-prone interfaces. He doe...

p> Part of the present inflation is caused by the breakdown of globalization, in particular supply chains, part is caused by the Corona Pandemic, in particular lockdowns, part is caused by the Ukrainian War, part is caused by European sanctions, and part – and not the smallest one – is caused by the European Central Bank’s printing money by hook or...

For testing categorical scaling, psychologists ordered subjects to consider the categories as equally spaced. This need not be mandated. This note shows that equally spaced categories will naturally emerge whenever subjects aim at providing maximum or equal information to the experimenter.

An der Kernfrage, ob Targetsalden lediglich Abgrenzungsposten eines Überweisungssystems im Rahmen der Europäischen Währungsunion, oder aber Kredit- bzw. Schuldbeziehungen zwischen souveränen Staaten eines Staatenbundes sind, hat sich jüngst eine heftige Kontroverse zwischen Martin Hellwig (erstere Position) und Hans-Werner Sinn (letztere Position)...

Ruben Martini tried to compare corporation tax régimes of different countries by means of elasticity, a concept imported from economics. Alas, his analysis teems with errors, such as subtraction of qualitative variables instead of numerical variables, lack of quantitative relationships between dependent and independent variables, neglect of approxi...

This is the first book that performs international and intertemporal comparisons of uniform tax progression with empirical data. While conventional measures of tax progression suffer from serious disadvantages for empirical analyses, this book extends uniform measures to progression comparisons of countries with different income distributions. Tax...

In Chap. 6 we present the qualitative results of our computations. All comparisons are classified into uniformly greater tax progression, bifurcate tax progression, or indeterminate cases. We consider international, intertemporal, and equivalence-scale-based comparisons of tax progression. International comparisons are carried out for all 13 countr...

This book started with a concise review of methods of measuring and comparing tax progression, viz. local measures, global measures, and uniform progression measures. They all suffer from specific drawbacks: local measures of tax progression suffer from their neglect of the income distribution, global measures of tax progression suffer from the dis...

In this chapter we analyze the intensities of progression differences for selected countries. So far, we have employed two analytical approaches, first, qualitative analyses in Sect. 5.2 and Chap. 6, and, second, statistical analyses in Chap. 7. The basic difference between these two approaches is that qualitative analyses depict curve differences...

Tax progression has ever been of concern, not only to the profession, but also to politicians, let alone to the man on the street. Hence, measurement of tax progression and international as well as intertemporal comparisons of tax progression are of utmost importance. Intuitively, by tax progression we mean a situation when, as income increases, so...

This is the core chapter of the theoretical part of the book. First, uniform measures of tax progression for identical incomes distributions are introduced. Next, the concept of uniform tax progression is extended to comparisons that involve different income distributions in order to facilitate international and intertemporal comparisons. It is als...

Chapter 3 gives an account of global measures of tax progression. In general global measures are indices of tax progression that aggregate over the whole support of the income distribution. The chapter distinguishes between global measures based on differences of inequality measures, ratios of inequality measures, and maximum differences of concent...

This chapter deals with local measures of tax progression. It begins with a brief digest of the development of income taxation. Then, it pictures local measures in detail. Their main drawback is that they completely ignore the income distribution. In the final section specific conditions for tax schedules to be progressive are derived from equal sa...

This chapter adds some statistical checks on top of the numerical comparisons reported in Chap. 6. Since LIS provides representative sample data, we can statistically test whether our qualitative statements with respect to uniformly greater tax progression, bifurcate tax progression, and indeterminacy are statistically significant. After elucidatin...

This chapter describes the data base and provides a detailed survey of the fiscal and social institutions of the countries examined in this book. It is explained how the authors dealt with the LIS microdata and how they rearranged the original data sets to make them suitable for computations. In order to make the relatively complex computations fea...

The conventional approach to comparing tax progression (using local measures, global measures or dominance relations for first moment distribution functions) often lacks applicability to the real world: local measures of tax progression have the disadvantage of ignoring the income distribution entirely. Global measures are affected by the drawback...

We experimentally study subjects’ compliance with dominance relationships of income distributions in a ranking task. The experiment consisted of four different treatments: Lottery, individual choice, social preferences, and social planner. Our results suggest that people's risk attitudes do not adequately reflect their inequality attitudes. Uninvol...

An income inequality measure satisfies the Pigou-Dalton transfer principle if progressive transfers decrease income inequality. When transfers cause transaction costs, one can trace out the maximum leakage such that the transfer pays at the margin. An income inequality measure is leaky-bucket consistent if the transaction costs of a transfer are ne...

Leaky-bucket transactions can be regarded as income transfers allowing for transaction costs. In its most rudimentary form, leaky-bucket transactions trace out the maximum “leakage” of transaction costs before income inequality is exacerbated, or—alternatively—before a welfare loss is experienced. This notion suggests that part of the income transf...

Deutschland leidet unter einer zu hohen marginalen Abgabenbelastung. Investitionen und Arbeitsplätze wandern in Niedrigsteuerländer und in Länder mit niedrigen Arbeitskosten [das heißt, in Länder mit niedrigen Löhnen und/oder niedrigen lohnbezogenen Abgaben] ab. Im Inland selbst führt die Zusatzlast der Abgabenerhebung zu Wohlfahrtsverlusten und Ab...

Die Arbeit von Deffains und Demougin betrachtet ein Modell mit zwei Produktionsfaktoren, Arbeit und Kapital, einem Konsumgut, welches mit zwei Technologien, einer mit ausschlie�lichem Kapitaleinsatz und einer mit additiv-separablem Arbeits- und Kapitaleinsatz, produziert werden k�nne, und zwei L�ndern mit jeweils einem Gesetzgeber, welcher die rela...

In this chapter, we make an experimental investigation of the role of context dependence in the individual assessment of incomes. Suppose, for example, you had to assign 14 equally spaced incomes to seven categories ranging from ‘very bad’ to ‘excellent’. As the incomes are equally spaced, it is very likely that you would assign two neighbouring in...

Ausgehend von der gegenwärtigen Situation Deutschlands im Bereich der Steuer- und Sozialpolitik untersucht dieses Buch deren Ursachen und analysiert Vorschläge für Steuerreformen und Reformen des sozialen Sicherungssystems und seiner Teile. Mit Hilfe von Mikrosimulationsmodellen werden die gängigen Steuerreformvorschläge, die nachgelagerte Besteuer...

This paper investigates preference reversals both for lotteries and income distributions as well as their interrelationship. In doing so, it offers several new features: Firstly, it provides a joint analysis of lotteries and income distributions. Secondly, the stimulus material used is considerably more general than used so far in the analysis of p...

This paper investigates distributive justice using a fourfold experimental design: The ignorance and the risk scenarios are combined with the self-concern and the umpire modes. We study behavioral switches between self-concern and umpire mode and investigate the goodness of ten standards of behavior. In the ignorance scenario, subjects became, on a...

This paper uses the data gained from an income categorization experiment for five shapes of income distributions to investigate background context effects, relative deprivation, range-frequency theory to explain back-ground context effects,individual income satisfaction versus aggregate well-being, and the dual patterns of income categorization and...

Using an experiment with material incentives, this paper investigates the violation of Lorenz relations in the case of dominant and single–crossing Lorenz curves. Our experimental design consists of two treatments: an income distribution treatment and a lottery treatment. Both treatments were conducted in Italy and Spain. In each treatment, subject...

Leaky-bucket transactions can be regarded as income transfers allowing for transaction costs. In its most rudimentary form, leaky-bucket transactions trace out the maximum “leakage” of transaction costs before income inequality is exacerbated, or before a welfare loss is experienced. This notion suggests that part of the income transfer should reac...

Peer review influences decisively personal advancement, research opportunities, salaries, grant-funding, promotion, and tenure. It claims to exert quality control of manuscripts and improve them, to promote innovative research, foster dissemination of new research, and to serve as a means to rank researchers, journals, and institutions. Nowadays pe...

This paper investigates distributive justice using a fourfold experimental design: The ignorance and the risk scenarios are combined with the self--concern and the umpire modes. We study behavioral switches between self--concern and umpire mode and investigate the goodness of ten standards of behavior.

This paper provides a comparative experimental study of risky prospects (lotteries) and income distributions. The experimental design consisted of multi–outcome lotteries and n–dimensional income distributions arranged in the shapes of ten distributions which were judged in terms of ratings and valuations, respectively. Material incentives applied....

Leaky–bucket transactions can be regarded as a generalization of the transfer principle allowing for transaction costs. In its most rudimentary form, leaky–bucket transactions trace out the maximum leakage of transaction costs such that a transfer still pays at the margin. Yet “to pay at the margin” bears at least two different connotations: It cou...

This paper provides a comparative experimental study of risky prospects (lotteries) and income distributions. The experimental design consisted of multi?outcome lotteries and n?dimensional income distributions arranged in the shapes of ten distributions which were judged in terms of ratings and valuations, respectively. Material incentives applied....

Amiel et al. (1999) use the Atkinson and the Gini social welfare functions to measure income inequality attitudes based on data from leaky-bucket experiments. Yet the experimental de-sign does not allow their subjects to perceive income inequality according to the Gini or the Atkinson inequality measures. Moreover, their experimental design tries t...

Using an experiment with material incentives, this paper investigates the violation of composite dominance relationships, viz. absolute Pareto dominance, Pareto rank dominance, transfer dominance, Lorenz dominance, and generalized Lorenz dominance. Moreover, we test tail independence. The experiment consists of two treatments, a self-concern mode (...

Manfred Rose ist ein Wissenschaftler, der zu Beginn seiner Laufbahn der theoretischen Finanzwissenschaft verbunden war. Seit mehr als einem Jahrzehnt wandte sich sein Interesse mehr und mehr Fragen der Umsetzung von Erkenntnissen der theoretischen Finanzwissenschaft in die finanzpolitische Praxis zu. Marksteine auf diesem Weg stellen seine Initiati...

This paper investigates taxpayers’ attitudes, behavior, and perception of fairness with respect to taxation using data drawn from a survey among German employees. It is shown that there is a large gulf between subjects’ attitudes towards taxation and their behavior. Although most subjects profess that their own taxation is either too high or far to...

This paper studies the perception of fairness of the income-tax splitting benefit of married couples under the German income-tax régime using interview data from 219 North German employees. The great majority of subjects disapprove of the present boon of tax splitting, which is considered as being excessive. No self-serving bias was observed in the...

The transfer principle requires inequality measures to decrease for mean preserving contractions. How much leakage of transfers can preserve inequality? Conditions are shown for leaky transfers to preserve inequality. We find that positive remainders with positive or negative leakage as well as negative remainders with positive leakage may occur. T...

This paper investigates taxpayers' attitudes, behavior, and perception of fairness with respect to taxation using data drawn from a survey among German employees. It is shown that there is a large gulf between subjects' attitudes towards taxation and their behavior. Although most subjects profess that their own taxation is either too high or far to...

. The present study examines framing effects in taxation. In October 1994 the German Minister of Family Affairs, Mrs. Ronsch, expectedly withdrew her candidacy for a second term after she had triggered off a storm of public indignation, owing to her plan to introduce tax surcharges for childless households in order to finance higher tax reliefs for...

Using an experimental design of stating equivalent probabilities for 252 stimulus lottery pairs, Chechile and Cooke (1997) alleged to have refuted generic-utility theory which itself comprises many modern utility theories. The present paper systematically investigates the feasibility of the Chechile-Cooke experimental design using numerical methods...

This paper investigates biases in the assessment of von Neumann-Morgenstern (NM) utility functions. Based on experimental data of 73 subjects, certainty and lottery equivalence NM utility functions are derived and analyzed. We observe violation of procedure invariance in the sense of dependence on the probability used to estimate the functions and...

This paper investigates two hypotheses of the screening phases of two-staged multiattribute choice procedures: the editing phase in which dominated choice alternatives are eliminated and the compatibility test of image theory. As the importance weights and rejection thresholds of the compatibility test are recalcitrant to elicitation, we develop a...

This paper investigates the existence of an editing phase and studies the compliance of subjects' behaviour with the most popular multiattribute decision rules. We observed that our data comply well with the existence of an editing phase, at least if we allow for a natural error rate of some 25%. We also found a satisfactory performance of certain...

To begin with, recall Amartya Sen’s well-known theorem establishing the impossibility of a social decision function which can simultaneously satisfy the conditions of unrestricted domain, the weak Pareto condition, and minimal liberalism (Sen, 1970). The impact of this theorem ‘on the social choice literature [is] fully comparable to that of Arrow’...

Martin Schneider is Professor of Economics at Stanford University. His research interests lie in Financial and Monetary Economics.

This paper investigates the impact of preferences for male offspring to female offspring upon the sex ratio of the population. Asymmetric procreation behaviour of this kind is modelled by assuming that a female's procreation ceases only after at least one son or n daughters are born. It is shown that such asymmetric procreation behaviour has no eff...

This paper investigates the impact of preferences for male offspring to female offspring upon the sex ratio of the population. Asymmetric procreation behavior of this kind is modelled by assuming that a female's procreation ceases only after at least one son or "n" daughters are born. It is shown that such asymmetric procreation behavior has no eff...

In this paper, questionnaire data from approximately 1,730 German and 880 Polish students are used to explore possible systematic or functional dependencies between distributional attitudes on the one hand, and subjective income evaluations and the necessity to work on the other. Specifically, respondents were given a questionnaire in which their a...

There are two categories of income distribution evaluations: first, the more-or-less “value-free” perception of income inequality as a statistical dispersion; and second, the valuation of income distributions according to an explicit social welfare function which is meant to capture all of society's value judgements. These societal value judgements...

A great variety of measures of tax progressivity has been proposed in the literature. Global measures of tax progressivity associate a single real number with each tax schedule using the income distribution which holds in the respective economy. Though it seems that global measures of tax progressivity might most easily cope with different income d...

This paper is an empirical study of the acceptability of distributional axioms. Data from five German universities were used to analyze attitudes with respect to the anonymity postulate, relative and absolute income inequality aversion (tests of the acceptability of scale and translation invariance), specific transfer affinities, and replication av...

An expenditure tax has been endorsed at various times by a respectable number of most notable scholars such as Thomas Hobbes, John Revans, John Stuart Mill, Eduard Pfeiffer, Alfred Marshall, Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, Arthur Cecil Pigou, Irving Fisher, Luigi Einaudi, Joseph A. Schumpeter, Nicholas Kaldor, and James Edward Meade, to name only the mos...

Though poverty is one of the most challenging problems from which mankind has ever suffered to my knowledge only one economist’s Nobel Lecture has dealt with this provocative issue. It began with the promising statement: “Most of the people in the world are poor, so if we knew the economics of being poor we would know much of the economics that rea...

Sofern man über Nutzenfunktionen des Einkommens, U(Y), verfügt, kann man aus den Prinzipien des gleichen absoluten Opfers$$U(Y) - U[Y - T(Y)] \equiv \pi ,$$ (1) bzw. des gleichen relativen Opfers $$ \frac{{U(Y) - U[Y - T(Y)]}}{{U(Y)}} \equiv \kappa ,$$ (2)

Hans-Werner Sinn, Munich, West Germany This book contains 15 papers presented at a conference in Neresheim, West Ger­ many, in June 1986. The articles were selected by anonymous referees and most of them have undergone substantial revisions since their presentation. The common topic is measurement of welfare, both from efficiency and from equity pe...

The phenomenon of economic crises and their causes have been central to Schumpeter’s thinking. His interest in theories of crises can be traced back as early as to the year 1910, when he published two essays on “The Modem Economic Theory in the United States1” and “On the Nature of Economic Crises2”. Schumpeter’s concern for economic crises exerted...

Samuelson has characterized his beloved teacher Schumpeter as a great showman1. Upon noticing serious discrepancies between Schumpeter’s biographies2 and documents I found in or received from various Viennese, Graz, and Czech archives, I finally remembered this dictum. First I had, of course, conjectured some sloppiness on the part of the biographe...

The year 1883 witnessed the birth of two great economists, Joseph Alois Schumpeter and John Maynard Keynes, and the death of another great economist, Karl Marx. Schumpeter, a devoted subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was bom on February 8th, 1883, in Třešť (Triesch) in Moravia. Keynes, a dyed-in-the-wool Englishman, was bom on June 5th, 1883,...

1883 war das Geburtsjahr von Keynes und Schumpeter und das Todesjahr von Marx. Keynes und Marx haben eigene ökonomische Theorien begründet, Schumpeter hat der klassischen Ökonomie bedeutende neue Impulse, speziell im Bereich der bislang vernachlässigten Systemdynamik, verliehen. Die Stunde der Bewährung schlug für diese drei rivalisierenden ökonomi...

OPTIMAL TAXATION UNDER ALTERNATIVE SOCIAL WELFARE FUNCTIONS by Christian SEIDL, University of Graz, Austria. This paper examines optimal taxation in a world with two types of taxpayers (skilled and unskilled) under various social welfare functions (utilitarian, minimization of total sacrifice, RAWLS’ maximin-justice, PARETO-optimum), two behavioura...

Nobel laureate Sir John Hicks has with good reason called the third quarter of the 1 twentieth century the age of Keynes • Sir John nevertheless diagnosed a crisis of Keynesian economics even before this period had expired. But if only a few gifted scholars had foreseen the crisis of Keynesian economics before 1975, this year at least marked the ul...

In sections 2 and 3 we gave a general outline of the requirements for a progressive income-tax function to be consistent, progressive and efficient. On the basis of the theoretical framework set up in the first three sections we then were able to present (sec. 4) and criticise (sec. 5) the socalled „traditional income-tax formula”, i. e. the income...

This paper reviews methods of comparing income tax progression. Section II deals with local measures of tax progression, Section III with global measures of tax progression, and Section IV with uniform tax progression. It is shown that all of this measures have specific drawbacks: they either ignore the income distribution altogether, aggregate ove...

Im europäischen Vergleich nimmt Deutschland bei den wichtigen ökonomischen Kennziffern einen der hinteren Plätze ein. Ohne ein durchgreifendes Sanierungskonzept wird es keinen Weg aus der Krise geben. Professor Christian Seidl plädiert für eine grundlegende Neugestaltung des Steuer- und Transfersystems. --