Melanie Häner-Müller, Michele Salvi, Christoph A. Schaltegger
{"title":"Tax redistribution offset? Effect of marital choices on income inequality","authors":"Melanie Häner-Müller, Michele Salvi, Christoph A. Schaltegger","doi":"10.1007/s10797-024-09847-8","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper examines the relationship between marital sorting and income inequality in Switzerland using individual tax data. We find that assortative mating intensifies at the tails of the income distribution. High and low earners specifically tend to marry alike. This pattern is exacerbating household income inequality—the Gini coefficient increases by more than 10% and the top 1% share by around 5% compared to random matching. By comparison, we show that the redistributive impact of marital sorting offsets the effect induced by taxation for most of the top income quintile. However, tax dominates the opposing mating redistribution from the top 5% income share.</p>","PeriodicalId":47518,"journal":{"name":"International Tax and Public Finance","volume":"81 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0000,"publicationDate":"2024-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"International Tax and Public Finance","FirstCategoryId":"96","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s10797-024-09847-8","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"ECONOMICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This paper examines the relationship between marital sorting and income inequality in Switzerland using individual tax data. We find that assortative mating intensifies at the tails of the income distribution. High and low earners specifically tend to marry alike. This pattern is exacerbating household income inequality—the Gini coefficient increases by more than 10% and the top 1% share by around 5% compared to random matching. By comparison, we show that the redistributive impact of marital sorting offsets the effect induced by taxation for most of the top income quintile. However, tax dominates the opposing mating redistribution from the top 5% income share.
期刊介绍:
INTERNATIONAL TAX AND PUBLIC FINANCE publishes outstanding original research, both theoretical and empirical, in all areas of public economics. While the journal has a historical strength in open economy, international, and interjurisdictional issues, we actively encourage high-quality submissions from the breadth of public economics.The special Policy Watch section is designed to facilitate communication between the academic and public policy spheres. This section includes timely, policy-oriented discussions. The goal is to provide a two-way forum in which academic researchers gain insight into current policy priorities and policy-makers can access academic advances in a practical way. INTERNATIONAL TAX AND PUBLIC FINANCE is peer reviewed and published in one volume per year, consisting of six issues, one of which contains papers presented at the annual congress of the International Institute of Public Finance (refereed in the usual way). Officially cited as: Int Tax Public Finance