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On the Intergenerational Incidence of Wage and Consumption Taxes
Author(s) -
Wigger Berthold U.
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
journal of public economic theory
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.809
H-Index - 32
eISSN - 1467-9779
pISSN - 1097-3923
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9779.2004.00154.x
Subject(s) - earnings , consumption (sociology) , economics , wage , incidence (geometry) , labour economics , demographic economics , tax incidence , private consumption , politics , monetary economics , public economics , indirect tax , fiscal policy , sociology , tax reform , political science , social science , physics , accounting , law , optics
This paper identifies the conditions that determine the intergenerational incidence of wage and consumption taxes. It emphasizes the role of the households' age‐earnings and age‐consumption profiles for an understanding of various intergenerational incidence patterns. Furthermore, the paper considers some political economy implications of the intergenerational incidence of wage and consumption taxes. It demonstrates that the distributional impact of wage versus consumption taxes bears the potential of a conflict between the young and the old on the one side and the middle‐aged on the other.