Stefan Traub

• Helmut Schmidt University

In most OECD countries, pension reform policy has decreased the level of intragenerational redistribution in the first pillar of the pension system over the last three decades, that is, redistribution among members of the same generation with high and low pension entitlements. This trend has occurred despite heterogeneity in life expectancy linked...

The presumption underlying the scientific engagement with need-based justice is that neither the principle of equity nor the principle of equality safeguards a distribution that ensures the preservation of human dignity through the satisfaction of needs as a fundamental proviso of human sociality. In this introductory chapter, we first show that in...

This chapter aggregates the results of the disciplinary and mostly experimental sub-projects of the research group “Need-Based Justice and Distribution Procedures” into an empirically informed normative theory of need-based justice. Its elements include a concept of need, the identification of need, the recognition of need, and the consequences of...

This chapter examines the economic sustainability of need-based income redistribution via the welfare state. We model the welfare state as an insurance device to reduce the variance of lifetime incomes when social inequality results from individual risk-taking, specifically educational investment. Our contract-theoretic model analysis shows that in...

Needs play a key role in many fields of social sciences and humanities, ranging from normative theories of distributive justice to conceptions of the welfare state. Over time, different conceptions of what counts as a need (i. e., what is considered a normatively relevant need) have been proposed. Many of them include (in one way or the other) need...

We report the results of a vignette study with an online sample of the German adult population in which we analyze the interplay between need, equity, and accountability in third-party distribution decisions. We asked participants to divide firewood between two hypothetical persons who either differ in their need for heat or in their productivity i...

In most OECD countries, pension reform policy has decreased the level of intragenerational redistribution over the last three decades, that is, redistribution among members of the same generation with high and low pension entitlements. This trend has occurred despite heterogeneity in life expectancy linked to socioeconomic status having a regressiv...

In most OECD countries, pension reform policy has decreased the level of intragenerational redistribution over the last three decades, that is, redistribution among members of the same generation with high and low pension entitlements. This trend has occurred despite heterogeneity in life expectancy linked to socioeconomic status having a regressiv...

In two experiments, participants had to choose between a sure and a risky option. The sure option was presented either in a gain or a loss frame. Need was defined as a minimum score the participants had to reach. Moreover, choices were made under two different time constraints and with three different levels of induced need to be reached within a f...

We report the results of a vignette experiment with a quota sample of the German population in which we analyze the interplay between need, equity, and accountability in third-party distributive decisions. We asked subjects to divide firewood between two hypothetical persons who either differ in their need for heat or in their productivity in terms...

This edited volume aims at exploring the foundations and prospects of a theory of need-based distributive justice by critically reviewing the literature on distributive justice from five different disciplines: philosophy, psychology, sociology, political science, and economics. This chapter has two main purposes. First, it provides a brief introduc...

This book explores the foundations and potential of a theory of need-based distributive justice, supported by experimental evidence. The core idea is that need-based distributive justice may have some legitimatory advantages over other important principles of distribution, like equality and equity, and therefore involves less dispute over the distr...

One feature of legislative bargaining in naturally occurring settings is that the distribution of seats or voting weights often does not accurately reflect bargaining power. Game-theoretic predictions about payoffs and coalition formation are insensitive to nominal differences in vote distributions and instead only depend on pivotality. We conduct...

One feature of legislative bargaining in naturally occurring settings is that the distribution of seats or voting weights often does not accurately reflect bargaining power. Game-theoretic predictions about payoffs and coalition formation are insensitive to nominal differences in vote distributions and instead only depend on pivotality. We conduct...

Zusammenfassung Die Energiewende bürdet den Verbrauchern zunehmende Lasten auf, die diese vor allem mit ihrer Stromrechnung zu begleichen haben. Die Ergebnisse der vorliegenden empirischen Studie zeigen, dass in der Regel eine Aufteilung der Kosten der Energiewende gewünscht wird, die Haushalte mit hohen Einkommen vergleichsweise stärker in die Pfl...

Die gesellschaftliche Zustimmung zu den politischen Zielen der Energiewende wird nicht unwesentlich von ihren finanziellen Verteilungswirkungen und den individuellen Gerechtigkeitsvorstellungen der privaten Haushalte beeinflusst. Die empirische Untersuchung dieses Zusammenhangs bildet den Kern dieses Beitrags, welcher die Ergebnisse des vom Bundesm...

In this paper, we model social preferences as a function of the skewness of the distribution of initial endowments. Skewness is a measure of the asymmetry of the distribution of endowments around the mean. We argue that skewness reflects the social distance between ‘elite’ players with high initial endowments and other players with lower endowments...

The paper reports the results of a laboratory experiment assessing the impact of social position (endowment) and power (structurally advantaged or disadvantaged network positions) on redistributive decisions, which involve a classical efficiency-equality trade-off. The experiment involves three decision conditions: veil of ignorance, informed dicta...

We introduce a skewness-based approach to measure tax progression and demand for redistribution. Adapting a novel, quantilebased statistical measure of skewness to right-skewed income distributions, we uncover its political economy foundation, by simultaneously relating the same measure to the classical model of income redistribution due to Meltzer...

One feature of legislative bargaining in the real world is that the distribution of seats or voting weights often does not accurately reflect real bargaining power. Game-theoretic predictions about payoffs and coalition formation are insensitive to such purely nominal differences. The converse idea that nominal differences might matter is referred...

We study the effect of competition on income distribution by means of a two-stage experiment. Heterogeneous endowments are earned in a contest, followed by a surplus-sharing task. The experimental test confirms our initial hypothesis that the existence of a middle class is as effective as institutional hurdles in limiting the power of the less able...

We experimentally study whether subjects motivated by social preferences deviate enough from material self-interest to overcome the anti-reform bias in voting on reform. We find that the incidence of efficiency-enhancing but inequality-increasing reforms increases because of sociotropic voting among reform losers. When allowing subjects to vote on...

Die Experimentalökonomik hat sich in den vergangenen Jahrzehnten sehr dynamisch entwickelt und genießt mittlerweile große Anerkennung als Forschungsmethode. Dennoch spielen Laborexperimente und deren Erkenntnisse in der Politikberatung allenfalls eine untergeordnete Rolle. In diesem Beitrag werden die Stärken und Schwächen von Laborexperimenten dis...

Aufgrund der bereits existierenden und sich in Zukunft ausweitenden Altersarmut steht der Reformbedarf der Leistungsseite der Gesetzlichen Rentenversicherung (GRV) im Zentrum wissenschaftlicher und politischer Diskussionen. Dabei geht es insbesondere um Personen mit lückenhaften Erwerbsbiografien und niedrigen Einkommen, die stark von Altersarmut b...

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...

Gegenstand der vorliegenden wissenschaftlichen Studie des Zentrums für Sozialpolitik der Universität Bremen im Auftrag der Wirtschaftskammer Österreich (WKÖ) und der Sozialversicherungsanstalt der gewerblichen Wirtschaft (SVA) ist ein internationaler Vergleich der sozialen Absicherung des Selbständigen. Aus dem Kreis der Selbständigen werden in die...

In this paper, we measure the extent and dissemination of the retreat of the state from entrepreneurial activities in 20 OECD countries during the 1980–2007 period using a three-dimensional concept and a new dataset, the REST database. We consider privatization, deregulation in network-based services, and the cutback of subsidies. Though the empiri...

We introduce a three-person redistribution game with preplay communication. Three focal points of the game are derived from different equity standards and Rawls' difference principle. An experimental test confirms our hypothesis that equity in terms of effort-proportionality is not pursued at the group level. Only a large 'middle class' and/or inst...

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...

Aufgrund bestehender und sich weiter verstärkender Altersarmut steht der Reformbedarf der Leistungsseite der Gesetzlichen Rentenversicherung (GRV) im Zentrum der wissenschaftlichen und politischen Diskussion. Im Fokus stehen dabei Personen mit lückenhaften Erwerbsbiographien und niedrigen Einkommen, die besonders stark von Altersarmut betroffen sin...

In this paper, we introduce a skewness-adjusted social-preferences functional, which models social preferences as a function of the skewness of the human capital distribution. We hypothesize that the “elite” of the society becomes more selfish with increasing skewness of the human-capital distribution. Hence, the members of the “elite” reduce their...

In diesem Beitrag werden die potentiellen Konfliktlinien zwischen Klima- und Sozialpolitik analysiert, Lösungsvorschläge diskutiert und zukünftiger Forschungsbedarf skizziert. So geraten die gesellschaftlichen Ziele der ökologischen und der sozialen Nachhaltigkeit dort in Konkurrenz zueinander, wo klimapolitische Lenkungsmaßnahmen durch Verteuerung...

Debating over efficiency-enhancing but inequality-increasing reforms accounts for the routine business of democratic institutions. Fernandez and Rodrik (1991) hold that anti-reform bias can be attributed to individual-specific uncertainty regarding the distribution of gains and losses resulting from a reform. In this paper, we experimentally demons...

We empirically investigate whether the significance of intragenerational redistribution in the public pillar of pension systems in 20 OECD countries has changed systematically since the 1980s and whether international convergence of the degree of intragenerational redistribution can be observed. Intragenerational redistribution is measured by the B...

Die vorliegende empirische Analyse beschäftigt sich mit der Frage, ob sich die Bedeutung der intragenerationalen Umverteilung in der staatlichen Säule der Rentensysteme von 20 OECD-Ländern seit den 1980er Jahren systematisch verändert hat und ob es zu einer internationalen Konvergenz des Umverteilungsgrads – gemessen anhand des Bismarckfaktors – ge...

We use a two-person public goods experiment to investigate how much agents value conditional cooperation when symmetric positive contributions entail efficiency losses. Asymmetric marginal per capita returns allow only the high-productivity player to increase group payoffs when contributing positive amounts. Asymmetric contributions, however, yield...

We empirically investigate whether the significance of intragenerational redistribution in the public pillar of pension systems in 20 OECD countries has changed systematically since the 1980s and whether international convergence of the degree of intragenerational redistribution can be observed. Intragenerational redistribution is measured by the B...

We empirically investigate whether the significance of intragenerational redistribution in the public pillar of pension systems in 20 OECD countries has changed systematically since the 1980s and whether international convergence of the degree of intragenerational redistribution can be observed. Intragenerational redistribution is measured by the B...

Published 2010 in: dms - der moderne staat - Zeitschrift für Public Policy, Recht und Management, Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 209-233. Zusammenfassung: Dieser Aufsatz zieht eine Zwischenbilanz des Rückzugs des Staates aus unternehmerischen Tätigkeiten in der OECD Welt seit 1980. Wir präsentieren einen kritischen Überblick über empirische Studien zu den Bes...

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 investigate the gap between willingness to pay and willingness to donate in the context of the promotion of green electricity. The experiment involves two differing scenarios (public choice versus individual choice) and two distinct public payment vehicles (direct tax versus indirect tax). Our main result is that subjects´ WTP sig...

This paper presents an experimental investigation of the individual Willingness to Pay (WTP) for green electricity. The experimental design comprises a public-choice scenario and an individual-choice scenario. It involves three different payment vehicles for the public promotion of renewables: direct tax, indirect tax and CO<sub align="right">2</su...

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...

We present an experimental analysis of subjects' individual in-formation collection and choice behavior in a series of multi-stage portfolio-selection problems. We recorded not only subjects' choices but also moni-tored the process of mouse movement that revealed information about the different portfolios. Our main results are, first, that subjects...

In this paper we experimentally investigate the disparity between willingness-to-accept (WTA) and willingness-to-pay (WTP) for risky lotteries. The direction of the income effect is reversed by endowing subjects with the highest price of a lottery when asking the WTP question. Our results show that the income effect is too small to be the only sour...

State-owned enterprises (SOEs) are often vertically integrated firms which operate in key industries like transport, telecommunication and power generation. They provide an infrastructure and invest in its quality. We discuss the effects of liberalization and their privatization which can be complete or partial such that upstream production is stil...

There is a huge body of literature in the social sciences that deals with the privatization of public enterprises in developed OECD countries after World War II. In the first part of this article, we present and critically examine empirical findings of comparative inquiries on the factors influencing cross-national differences in privatization effo...

This paper presents a set of artefacutal field experiments on individual preferences and willingness to pay, respectively, for the consumption of green electricity. Based on an economic model of individual preferences for the provision of public goods, the design of our experiments involved different scenarios: subjects had to decide about their in...

This study empirically exams the combination of regret aversion and false reference points in a residential real estate context. Survey respondents were put in a hypothetical situation, where they had purchased an investment property several years ago. Hindsight knowledge about a foregone all time high was introduced. As hypothesized, respondents o...

In a laboratory experiment, subjects were endowed with money and waiting time. Preferences for waiting time reduction were elicited with salient rewards both as a private good and as a public good. The allocations of the public good that were theoretically predicted by the Nash equilibrium and the Lindahl equilibrium, respectively, were computed fr...

Using a sample of 20 OECD countries it is shown that the majority of countries decreased the level of intragenerational redistribution in the first pillar of their pension systems, though the evidence is weak in statistical terms. We find strong correlations between changes of the so-called Bismarckian factor and changes of the generosity of the pe...

This paper presents an experimental investigation of individual preferences for the consumption of green electricity under alternative payment vehicles for the promotion of renewables. The experimental design involves individual choice treatments as well as public choice treatments. We study differences in subjectspsila demand behaviour for green e...

This study empirically examines familiarity bias in a residential real estate context. The results confirm the status quo deviation aversion hypothesis and to a lesser extent the increasing status quo deviation aversion hypothesis. Familiarity bias is strongest at the country level and least pronounced in the Asian population, while North Americans...

Corruption in the public sector erodes tax compliance and leads to higher tax evasion. Moreover, corrupt public officials abuse their public power to extort bribes from the private agents. In both types of interaction with the public sector, the private agents are bound to face uncertainty with respect to their disposable incomes. To analyse effect...

We state efficiency conditions for the provision of congestable local public goods that diminish individual-specific proprietary risks. The optimum level of such a public service is determined by equating the sum of the reductions of the expected property losses due to a better service level with the marginal costs of the service. The optimum size...

Zweck dieses Beitrags war es, einen kurzen Überblick über die verschiedenen Steuerreformvorschläge von Wissenschaftlern, Expertengruppen und politischen Parteien zu geben. Die Verwirklichung radikaler Vorschläge, wie der „echten“ flat tax oder der Konsumsteuer, die einen Systemwechsel verlangen würden, ist offensichtlich für Deutschland nicht zu er...

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...

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...

In this paper, we present a spatial model of the public provision of the performing arts. Agents behave boundedly rational. Art directors set performance quality according to their aspiration levels. While taking into account the spatial distribution of the population, administrative directors in calculating ticket prices ignore that they compete w...

In this paper, we present a model in which the performing arts are modelled as congestible public goods. In accordance with empirical evidence, the production of seat capacity is assumed to be subject to fixed costs. We estimate the parameters of the model's demand and cost functions using German data. Using these estimates in a subsequent social c...

The ongoing liberalization of electricity markets in most western countries forms the background of our artefactual field experiment. Using a Cheap talk design [R.G. Cummings and L.O. Taylor. American Economic Review 89 (1999) 649–665] with supplementary monetary incentives, we test for presence of “warm glow” motivations [J. Andreoni. Journal 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.

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 (...

In this paper, we take up the question why a group of sovereign countries is willing to form a federation even if residents of the high-income region suspect potential immigrants to be net beneficiaries of the tax and transfer system. We argue that income uncertainty alone cannot satisfactorily explain the formation of federations, since in many ex...