<p>The aim of this study is to analyse the Swedish state´s ambition in achieving equality among its citizens. By studying the new urban policy introduced by the government in 1998 from a theoretical perspective the purpose of this essay is to understand the ideational dimensions in this policy project, in regard to established understandings about equality.</p><p>The theoretical framework on which this study is based consists of two different parts. The first presents dominating models on welfare states, mainly focusing on the socialdemocratic welfare state. The second introduces influential theoretical views on equality, primarily discussing universalism and a differentiated equality view. It also presents theoretical views on how to understand the relationship between the state an its citizens. This essay is taking its departure from a perspective based on constructionism, by asking how the problem was constructed and what the policy tells us. It is a case study using a discoursive approach in analysing the policy from an understanding of policies as arguments shaped by normative assumptions made by actors whose assumptions are limited by the discourse in which they exist.</p><p>The main result of the study is that since the policy was created while the socialdemocratic party was in government, the normative assumptions, on which the party base its analysis on society, therefore had a main influence on the policy. Even though the analysis of the policy shows a tendency in Swedish welfare politics moving away from universalism towards a differentiated view on equality, with the state still marked by communitarian ideals, there appears to be a resistance towards including the perspective of cultural recognition next to the traditional view on economic redistribution based on a class theory.</p>

Notre étude a cherché à comprendre comment des acteurs locaux se connectent au transnational, quelle est la contribution de ces échanges au processus de développement local et quelle perspective peut en être envisagée. Comme cadre, elle a porté principalement sur les micro-commerçants de Butembo, au Nord-Est du Congo. L'objectif général a été d'analyser l'articulation entre rapports sociaux et rapports marchands dans les échanges transnationaux et l'impact de cette dynamique sur le processus de développement local. Notre étude s'inspire du courant de pensée néo-braudélien en histoire économique et sociale, qui établit qu'historiquement, l'économie ne procède pas uniquement de principes économiques mais aussi de rapports sociaux. Ce genre d'approche permet de reconnaître que pour le développement des échanges, le réseau de socialité est tout aussi important que la rationalité mise en avant par un certain individualisme méthodologique. D'autre part il contribue également à adopter une autre vision du secteur dit informel et de l'économie populaire, en termes d'articulation d'acteurs. En partant des pratiques d'acteurs qui s'adonnent aux échanges transnationaux, il y a lieu d'analyser autrement le commerce extérieur. Nous parlons de "transnational" plutôt que d'international, pour mettre en exergue la dimension d'ignorance des systèmes nationaux par ces marchands dont les opérations traversent différents espaces nationaux. Nous ne parlons pas de l'"informel transnational" au sens des mouvements qui transgressent les cadres étatiques car dans ce cas il s'identifierait à l'illégal. Mais nous faisons plutôt référence aux flux des personnes, des services et des biens à travers des espaces de plusieurs Etats, qui évoluent malgré les institutions de ces Etats, au travers de leurs cadres. Les acteurs y évoluent grâce à d'autres institutions, d'autres pratiques qui peuvent apparaître atypiques. C'est le cas du parrainage, des contacts réticulaires personnalisés. Les réseaux sont locaux et transnationaux. Des acteurs locaux pour effectuer des opérations transnationales, ont besoin des contacts dans d'autres pays. Dans la mesure où ces différents acteurs sont interconnectés, nous sommes en présence de réseaux. Le réseau assume ainsi une fonction d'intermédiation pour connecter le local au transnational. L'insertion dans le réseau est liée aux relations basées sur l'appartenance religieuse, les rapports familiaux ou amicaux, le village de provenance, la confiance, le parrainage. Les opérations économiques sont ainsi portées par des relations sociales. L'analyse en termes de réseau permet de sortir d'une approche de dépersonnalisation des relations économiques. Par ailleurs, si l'économie officielle a cessé de faire vivre la population, n'est-il pas pertinent de changer d'échelle et de prendre suffisamment en considération les initiatives d'autoprise en charge à la base ? En effet, des processus de développement sont en œuvre à Butembo comme sans doute ailleurs en Afrique. Une conception universaliste et modernisatrice du développement fausse le regard sur ces processus. Le développement local fait référence à un processus de prise en charge individuelle et collective des initiatives en vue de l'amélioration de la qualité de vie et du cadre de vie pour les individus et la communauté à l'échelle locale. En Afrique, ces initiatives n'attendent souvent pas un cadre et des institutions formelles pour s'exprimer. En l'absence de l'État comme moteur du développement, l'associatif a pris le relais au niveau local dans le cadre d'une responsabilisation locale et contribue au renforcement du lien social. Généralement, ces initiatives ne pèsent pas lourd, du point de vue quantitatif. Mais, à l'échelle locale, il s'agit des petits pas du processus de développement. Les travaux d'infrastructures, qui constituent un des aspects sur lesquels portent les initiatives locales, nécessitent des moyens qui sont souvent mobilisés dans le cadre des associations d'acteurs, parmi lesquelles les groupements des commerçants. Ces associations constituent ainsi des cadres de redistribution au service des initiatives locales. Ces dernières traduisent une demande de maîtrise des choix de développement par les populations elles-mêmes, à l'échelle locale. Les pratiques locales imposent donc de nous rendre compte de l'importance de l'ancrage local des processus de développement et de la nécessité de les consolider en vue d'y baser des politiques à long terme. Enfin dans le débat sur "l'économie informelle" et "populaire", l'approche en termes d'acteurs plutôt que de secteur, contribue, par la compréhension de leurs pratiques, à montrer l'importance de leur articulation historique au sein d'un espace et son rôle pour une conceptualisation du rapport entre commerce et développement.

The paper is based on an individual life-cycle model, which describes the purely economic components of human capital. The present value of human capital is determined by all future income flows, which at the same time constitute the individual as well as the total tax base of a nation. Therefore, the income of the productive population determines the total tax revenue, which is spent for public goods (including education) and transfers (for poverty reduction). The efficient design of the education system (by private and public education investments) determines the quality of the human capital stock as well as the future gross income flows. The costs of public goods and the transfer expenditures have to be financed from the total tax revenue, which also affects the individual tax burden via the specific tax bases and tax rates. Especially the redistribution of income is connected with serious disincentives, influencing the preferences for work and leisure as well as for consumption and saving. An efficient tax and transfer system being accompanied by an education system financed in public private partnership, which treats equally labor and capital income, sets positive incentives for the formation of human, financial, and real capital. An important prerequisite for a sustainable growth process is the efficient design of the social security system, being based on the family as well as a collective risk equalization scheme. If that system is diminishing absolute poverty in an appropriate time period by transfers and vocational education measures for the grown-up as well as high quality primary, secondary and tertiary education programs for the children, the transfer expenditure would decrease and the tax bases (income and consumption) increase, lowering the burden on the productive population. For the first time, this micro model presented in this paper pools all the relevant variables for development within a simple life-cycle model, which can also be used for a powerful analysis of the current failures in existing tax and transfer schemes and fruitful empirical investigations. Hence, an efficient tax and transfer scheme strongly contributes to an improved national position in the global competition.

This thesis consists of five self-contained essays. Essay 1. (with Sören Blomquist and Luca Micheletto)  Using a calibrated overlapping-generations model we quantify the welfare gains of an age-dependent labor income tax. Agents face uncertainty regarding future abilities and can transfer consumption across periods through savings. The welfare gain of switching from an age-independent to an age-dependent nonlinear tax varies between 2.4% and 4% of GDP. Part of the welfare gain is due to capital accumulation effects and part descends from relaxing incentive-compatibility constraints. The welfare gain is of about the same magnitude as the welfare gain that can be achieved by moving from a linear- to a nonlinear labor income tax. Finally, the welfare loss from tax-exempting interest income is negligible under an optimal age-dependent labor income tax. Essay 2. (with Sören Blomquist and Luca Micheletto) Previous literature has shown that public provision of private goods can be a welfare-enhancing device in second-best settings where governments pursue redistributive goals. However, three issues have so far been neglected. First, the case for supplementing an optimal nonlinear income tax with public provision of private goods has been made in models where agents differ only in terms of market ability. Second, the magnitude of the welfare gains achievable through public provision schemes has not been assessed. Third, the similarities/differences between public provision schemes and tagging schemes have not been thoroughly analyzed. Our purpose in this paper is therefore threefold: first, to extend previous contributions by incorporating in the theoretical analysis both heterogeneity in market ability and in the need for the publicly provided good; second, to perform numerical simulations to quantify the size of the potential welfare gains achievable by introducing a public provision scheme, and to characterize the conditions under which these welfare gains are sizeable; finally, to compare the welfare gains from public provision with the welfare gains from tagging. Essay 3. (with Sören Blomquist and Luca Micheletto) Subsidized child care is a common phenomenon in both Europe and the United States. In this paper we study the efficiency of some of the most common types of child care subsidies. These are a (refundable) tax credit, tax deductibility and public provision. We evaluate the relative efficiency of these instruments using a quantitative simulation model calibrated to resemble the US economy. In our framework there is a special tax treatment for families with children of child care age, which is based on an assumption that agrees with facts pertaining to actual circumstances in the United States, as well as many other countries. We keep the net tax revenue for this group of tax payers constant, hence the subsidies to child care are paid for by the group itself. It is a commonly held view that in a 'good society' all children should have equal opportunities in life. Many proponents of subsidized childcare argue that one way to move in this direction is to allow all children access to good quality child care. We capture this ideological perspective by using a paternalistic social welfare function which places special emphasis on the quality of child care purchased by households. Using a standard social welfare function we find tax deductibility to be the most efficient instrument to subsidize child care and public provision the least efficient instrument. These results are completely reversed when using the paternalistic welfare function and when  society has the goal of providing all children with access to good quality child care.  Public provision then becomes the best way to subsidize child care.  An important aspect of public provision is that it is an efficient instrument in raising the quality of child care. Essay 4.  In a recent paper Alesina et al. (2011) construct a model in which different labor supply elasticities for men and women emerge endogenously from intra-household bargaining. In this paper I explore the optimal tax implications of their model in an economy with both singles and couples and inequality across as well as within households. In the model, the welfare of married women can be improved by lowering taxes for single women. However, this benefit must be weighed against the welfare cost of taxing single men and women at different rates. Moreover, if single men earn more than single women, the welfare of married women can alternatively be improved by a gender-neutral tax scheme which taxes singles at a higher rate. Because the government is concerned not only with equalizing utilities within families, but also with the redistribution between high income and low income households, gender-based adjustments in the income tax must be weighed against the welfare consequences of changing the progressivity of the tax system. I find that larger lump-sum transfers to women is always optimal. Interestingly, marginal tax rates, on the other hand, should be lower for women only if the exogenous bargaining power of men is moderate. The welfare gains of gender based taxation are sizable and the welfare gains of having tax instruments which depend on household composition are even larger. Essay 5. (with Håkan Selin) Recent microeconometric studies of taxpayers' responsiveness to taxation have shown that intensive margin labor supply and earnings elasticities typically are modest and sometimes equal to zero. However,a common view is that long-run responses might still be large since micro-estimates are downward biased owing to optimization frictions. In this paper we estimate the taxable income elasticity at a very large kink point of the Swedish tax schedule using the bunching method. During the period of study the change in the log net-of-tax rate reached a maximum value of 45.6%. Interestingly, we obtain a precise elasticity estimate of zero for wage earners at this large kink. The size of the kink allows us to derive tighter bounds on the long-run elasticity than previous studies. If wage earners on average tolerate 1% of their disposable income in optimization costs, the upper bound on the long-run taxable income elasticity is 0.39. We also evaluate the performance of the bunching estimator by performing Monte Carlo simulations.

The general problem I am addressing concerns the role of the university as an actor for increased equality and democracy. How does this role manifest itself in selecting and recruiting students to the university and how does it influence teaching? The aim of my empirical study is to describe and understand processes and contexts where ethnicity and class are important. The empirical material consists of interviews with students and teachers from the department of law at Uppsala University. To analyze the consequence of ethnical and social diversity I have chosen theories which are founded in a feminist, emancipating and democratic pedagogy with a focus on connected teaching. Connected teaching is the opposite of “banking education”. In banking education the teacher deposits knowledge in the students. To analyse if the student can contribute with different perspectives on perception of knowledge and modes of learning I have studied the acting space and degrees of freedom given the students. My investigation shows that the students thirst for being supplied with the right track to become jurists, and the teachers support this. Social and ethnical background is made invisible, at the same time as it can become an obstacle. Not every student has a voice in the seminar and most of them have not learnt to extend their space for action, but rather have a desire to be taught or just supplied with knowledge. To strengthen the connection between teaching and the intentions in higher education the students should be encouraged, and the barriers against raising one’s own critical voice must disappear. Furthermore, acting space for participation is needed to influence a democratic educational process. The governments’ means to counter uneven recruitment has mainly consisted in increasing the number of educational seats. With the current admission regulations (autumn 2008) higher education will continue to reflect class society on a structural level. Keywords: Higher education, ethnicity, class, democracy, selection, recruitment, redistribution

This dissertation comprises two essays that attempt to determine, empirically, the relationship between personal income taxation and income inequality. The first essay examines whether income inequality is affected by the structural progressivity of national income tax systems. Using detailed personal income tax schedules for a large panel of countries, we develop and estimate comprehensive, time-varying measures of structural progressivity of national income tax systems over the 1981–2005 period. Our findings suggest that progressivity has a strong negative effect on inequality in reported gross and net income and that this negative effect is strongest in countries whose institutional framework supports pro-poor redistribution. However, the effect of progressivity on true inequality, which is approximated by consumption-based measures of the GINI coefficient, is significantly smaller. The second essay relies on household level data and complements the first in its empirical approach. We simulate the distributional impact of the Russian personal income tax (PIT) following the flat tax reform of 2001 using data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey. We use a series of counterfactuals to decompose the change in the distribution of net income into a direct (tax) effect and an indirect behavioral effect. As expected, the direct tax effect increased net income inequality. Changes in the pre-tax distribution, on the other hand, had a large negative impact on inequality thus leading to an overall decline in net income inequality. We also find that the tax-induced evasion response increased reported net income inequality while reducing consumption based measures of net income inequality.

The purpose of this dissertation is to identify the impact of moral emotions (sympathy and empathy) and religious education on individual behavior. This dissertation is divided into three main chapters. The first chapter examines the effect of sympathy and empathy on tax compliance. We run a series of experiments in which we employ methods such as priming, the Davis Empathic Concern scale, and questions about frequency of prosocial behaviors in the past year in order to promote and to identify empathy and sympathy in subjects. We observe the subjects’ decisions in a series of one-shot tax compliance game presented at once and with no immediate feedback. Our results suggest that the presence and/or the promotion of sympathy in most cases encourage tax compliance. The second chapter takes into consideration religious schooling as a way of helping the development of religiosity or morality on individuals. Our intent is to investigate the effect of religious education on charitable donations in adulthood. Our empirical analysis is based on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics dataset. Our estimation results indicate that there is a positive effect of religious education on donations to secular and religious organizations. The third chapter explores the hypothesis that sympathetic individuals are more likely to support income redistribution because they believe that the poor may benefit from this policy. We use data from the General Social Survey to estimate support for income distribution. Our results suggest that some measures of sympathy have a positive effect on support for redistribution. Across all three main chapters, we find that sympathy has mostly small and positive effects on the types of behavior examined in this dissertation, although we are not able to determine the impact of religious education on charitable donations. Despite the sometimes weak results of this research caused by the limitations of the available data and the complexity of the issues studied, we believe that the development of these moral emotions is likely to generate benefits to society.

Field-scale transport through unsaturated soil is influenced by surface and subsurface boundary conditions, and the spatial variability of state soil variables. The objective of this thesis is to examine the relative importance of the spatial redistribution of surface water versus spatial variability of soil properties on long-term transient water flow and transport under semi-arid conditions. The field-scale transport (34 yr) of a surface applied tracer (chloride), spatial variability of other pedogenic tracers, and surface water redistribution over a 19 mo fallow period were measured in a catchment basin. In 1966 and 1971, a chloride tracer (KCl) was surface applied to plots (6.1 m x 90 m, Chernozemic soil) near Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. In 2000 and 2001, 262 soil cores were taken along and perpendicular to one KCl strip. Soil layering at each core was recorded and samples were analysed for chloride concentration, electrical conductivity, bulk density and water content. Sulphate and nitrate concentrations were measured on selected cores. The site is level by common definitions, with a very slight concave depression (1.8% grade) midway along the KCl strip and a slight grade (¡Ü2.1%) perpendicular to the KCl strip. Measured water recharge indicated slight differences in surface slope had a marked effect on redistribution of water and spatial distribution of the chloride tracer. An estimated 90% of redistributed water was subsequently used by plants and 10% resulted in an increase in deep drainage. A varved layer had a strong influence on the subsurface redistribution of water and chloride below the root zone. There were sharp horizontal transitions between areas of slow and faster transport, which corresponded to sharp increases in catchment area and water recharge. Small surface depressions, which controlled pedogenic transport and soil formation, have been filled in by tillage translocation. Spatial variability of soil horizon thickness (and associated hydraulic properties) had little effect on transport of chloride after 34 yr. Computer simulations also suggest substantial surface redistribution of precipitation and snowmelt. In contrast to the measured chloride data, the model was sensitive to changes in hydraulic properties and horizon thickness in the root zone. Surface water redistribution was the primary factor controlling long-term transport.

In this thesis, F.A. Hayek's argument is against social justice is given context, discussed, and evaluated. Hayek was one of the leading voices of libertarian ideology in the Twentieth Century. While Road to Serfdom is his most popular work, Hayek's philosophy is most fully expressed in his three volume set, Law, Legislation and Liberty. His thoughts against social justice are found the in the second volume, entitled The Mirage of Social Justice. It is the conclusion of the author that Hayek's argument against social justice, in the form of redistribution, falls short as it depends on a presupposition that an evolutionary moral and legal process will necessarily end in securing a libertarian style of government. The only possible means of salvaging the argument would to accept inherent and inviolable human rights, which Hayek fundamentally rejects as he claims the Kantian tradition.

The current degree of economic inequality in the US is the largest it has been since prior to the Great Depression and growing. Economic inequality is linked to mortality, social capital, interpersonal trust, and democratic participation, beyond the effects of poverty. Two main constructs are reviewed as predictors of support for efforts to reduce inequality: 1) distributive justice norms (equity and equality of outcome), and 2) causal attributions (individual and structural). Justification of the unequal status quo is often driven by reference to dominant cultural values personal responsibility and just deserts, which are likened to individual attributions and equity, respectively. However, individuals may also recognize that economic outcomes are determined by structural factors such as discrimination and privilege. Recognition that structural factors determine economic outcomes is referred to as systems analysis. Systems analysis is expected to be unrelated to individual attributions, reflecting the common view that economic outcomes are determined by both individual and structural factors. Furthermore, systems analysis is conceptualized as the central determinant of both the extent to which equality of outcome is desirable, despite prevailing preferences for equity, and the use of dominant cultural values as justifications for opposition to redistribution. Because systems analysis reflects the view that resources are not distributed solely based on individual merit, it implies that resources are not distributed fairly. This belief is expected to increase endorsement for equality of outcome and weaken negative effects of equity and individual attributions on support for redistribution. Predictors of support for government action to reduce inequality were examined using the US sample (n = 1414) of the 1991 International Social Justice Project. Opposition to reducing inequality is often driven by reference to dominant cultural values such as the equity distributive justice norm and individualistic causal attributions. The present study tested the hypothesis that supporters and opponents share a common endorsement of these dominant values, but differ in the extent to which they acknowledge that structural factors determine economic outcomes (defined as systems analysis). Results indicated that the negative relationship between individual attributions and support for redistribution was only significant among participants with low systems analysis.