Writing this book has been a great pleasure. Some portion of that enjoyment has been in wrestling with questions about politics and the economy that we find tremendously important. Another portion is working with incredibly talented research assistants, talking with our many insightful colleagues and students, and enjoying the process of learning together. We and the book have benefited from a great many friends.
We are especially grateful to the research assistants who helped us collect data for this project. Federica Genovese and Arnd Plagge deserve special thanks, as they respectively led our construction of databases on income and inheritance taxes for twenty countries over the last two centuries. They each exhibited great skill and persistence in organizing these projects and were a pleasure to work with. Michaël Aklin, Sebastian Barfort, Quintin Beazer, Laurens Defau, Aaron Egolf, Navid Hassanpour, Marko Karttunen, Risa Kitagawa, Krista Ryu, Kong Joo Shin, Rory Truex, Kris-Stella Trump, and Johan van Rijn all made important contributions to our data collection for which we are very grateful. We also appreciate advice and data that we received from Debasis Bandyopadhyay, Wantje Fritschy, Egbert Jongen, Teresa Miguel, Anton Rainer, Muireann Toibin, Daniel Waldenström, and Nico Wilterdink. In addition to the construction of these databases, we want to thank Eric Arias, Erdem Aytaç, Cameron Ballard-Rosa, Allison Carnegie, Maria Carreri, Suon Choi, Brian Fried, Nikhar Gaikwad, Saad Gulzar, Marlene Guraieb, Robin Harding, Rocio Hernandez, Young Joe Hur, Caitlyn Littlepage, Yiming Ma, Lily McElwee, Umberto Mignozzetti, John Morgan, Jana Persky, Nick Powell, Steve Rashin, Mike Schwartz, Martin Soyland, Peter Vining, Jason Weinreb, Jack Weller, and Emily West for excellent research assistance on various other aspects of the project. We want to particularly thank Sarah Cormack-Patton for her work in the final stages of finishing the book. Finally, we want to acknowledge and thank our coauthors, Cameron Ballard-Rosa, Xiaobo Lü, Lucy Martin, and Massimiliano Onorato for letting us use some material from related papers in this book.
Our research has benefitted greatly from comments and criticisms from many colleagues. We want to especially thank Thad Dunning for organizing a book workshop for us at Berkeley. We received extremely helpful comments from Thad, Jonah Levy, Eric Schickler, Shannon Stimson, and Rob Van Houweling, who served as our discussants, as well as many other faculty and students who participated. A number of other colleagues and students read all or parts of the manuscript and provided useful criticisms and suggestions that improved the book substantially. These included Jim Alt, Carles Boix, Pat Egan, Jeff Frieden, Marty Gilens, Steve Haber, Bob Keohane, Evan Lieberman, Margaret Levi, Bernard Manin, Nolan McCarty, Jason Oh, Adam Przeworski, Ryan Pevnick, Steve Pincus, Dani Rodrik, Ron Rogowski, Michael Ross, Melissa Schwartzberg, Ken Shepsle, Jim Snyder, Sue Stokes, and Eric Zolt. We also presented the book manuscript to audiences at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research’s Institutions, Organizations, and Growth Program, FGV EBAPE, Harvard University, the Institute for Advanced Study, the University of Pennsylvania, IPEG Barcelona, Stanford University, UCLA, the University of Michigan, the University of San Andrés, and the University of Vienna.
At Princeton University Press, we are grateful to Eric Crahan for his support of the project and his excellent advice for improving the manuscript. We were also fortunate to receive advice from two reviewers that helped us anticipate a number of important questions about our argument and the evidence. We thank Karen Verde and Brigitte Pelner for all of their work in preparing the manuscript for publication. We acknowledge the American Political Science Review, International Organization, and the Journal of Economic History for allowing us to use material from articles that we previously published in those journals.
This project would not have been possible without the generous funding that we have had for our research. We received substantial funding from the MacMillan Center for International Affairs and the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University, The Europe Center and Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University, and New York University. We are also grateful for a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation, RSF Project #83-08-01.
Finally, the book is dedicated to Melissa and Lauren, to whom we are thankful for many things including challenging us to think more deeply about equality. We also thank our children, Ally, Ben, Rivka, and Ezra who, while skeptical about how interesting a book about taxes might be, are pretty adamant about debating what’s fair.