Lifetime income is less variable than annual household income, since the latter reflects transitory shocks to wages, family status, and employment. This implies that lowincome households in one year have some chance of being higherincome households in other years, and significantly affects the estimated distributional burden of excise taxes. This paper shows that household expenditures on gasol...

Food taxes increase prices of food or food ingredients in order to stimulate consumers to change their eating behaviour and finally to level up population health. Their aim is to tackle the high rates of obesity and other lifestyle diseases. As Bonnet argues, often food taxes are set up out of an economic perspective (1). To change consumer behaviour is one thing, to level up people’s health is...

We study the dynamics of the distribution of wealth in an Overlapping Generation economy with bequest and various forms of redistributive taxation. We characterize the transitional dynamics of the wealth distribution and as well as the stationary distribution. We show that the stationary wealth distribution is a Pareto distribution. Wealth is less concentrated (the Gini coefficient is lower) fo...

Common government policy towards curbing unhealthy alcohol drinking behavior is to raise taxes thereby lowering consumption. This study examines how alcohol excise taxes (beer, spirits and wine) affect the number of individuals being treated for alcoholism in state facilities as well as effects on consumption on the state and regional levels in the United States. State-level data for the 50 sta...

OBJECTIVES We examined news coverage of public debates about large taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) to illuminate how the news media frames the debate and to inform future efforts to promote obesity-related public policy. METHODS We conducted a quantitative content analysis in which we assessed how frequently 30 arguments supporting or opposing SSB taxes appeared in national news med...