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Revisiting The Roles Of Legal Rules And Tax Rules In Income Redistribution: A Response To Kaplow & Shavell, Ronen Avraham, David Fortus, Kyle D. Logue
Revisiting The Roles Of Legal Rules And Tax Rules In Income Redistribution: A Response To Kaplow & Shavell, Ronen Avraham, David Fortus, Kyle D. Logue
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The debate over whether legal rules should be used to redistribute resources in society or whether redistribution should be left exclusively to the tax-and-transfer system has long occupied philosophers, political theorists, economists, and legal academicians. For many years, the conventional wisdom on this question among legal scholars seemed to be that blanket generalizations were inappropriate. All systems of redistribution distort individuals' choices and entail administrative costs. Therefore, the argument went, a universal preference for using the tax-and-transfer system to redistribute is not justified. Rather, the choice among institutions to accomplish society's redistributive goals was considered to be "an empirical one …
Redistributing Optimally: Of Tax Rules, Legal Rules, And Insurance, Kyle D. Logue, Ronen Avraham
Redistributing Optimally: Of Tax Rules, Legal Rules, And Insurance, Kyle D. Logue, Ronen Avraham
Articles
From the beginning of the law and economics movement, normative legal economists have focused almost exclusively on evaluating the efficiency of alternative legal rules. The distributional consequences of legal rules, therefore, have largely been ignored. It is tempting to conclude that legal economists are hostile or indifferent to concerns of distributional fairness. In fact, however, the discipline of economics has a great deal to say about distributional policy. The normative branch of economics, known as welfare economics, has always been deeply concerned with distributional issues. It is not that welfare economists purport to know a priori the "right" or "optimal" …