Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/57280 
Year of Publication: 
2012
Series/Report no.: 
CESifo Working Paper No. 3774
Publisher: 
Center for Economic Studies and ifo Institute (CESifo), Munich
Abstract: 
This paper intends to make a two-fold contribution to the literature. First, it studies a political economy model of family taxation using a household economics approach to behaviour; the nature of the winning policy is found to depend on whether i) the parents control their fertility or not, ii) they value their children or not. Second, it investigates the question whether the winning policy is capable to achieve horizontal equity (i.e. the requirement that all agents who are in all relevant senses identical should be treated identically); it turns out that under endogenous fertility, any winning policy trivially satisfies horizontal equity, but if fertility is exogenous for some of (or all) the parents, horizontal equity is virtually impossible to satisfy. The assessment on whether a given family taxation scheme attains horizontal equity objectives cannot therefore be independent from the assessment on the nature of fertility behaviour.
Subjects: 
family taxation
horizontal equity
fertility
political economy
median voter
family size
JEL: 
D13
D72
H31
J13
Document Type: 
Working Paper
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