The Tax Unit and Household Production.

This paper challenges the conventional wisdom that, on efficiency grounds, taxing individuals is always preferred to taxing households in a progressive income tax. The reason is that tax design affects the input of family members' time not only into market production and consumption of leisure but into household production as well. A simple numerical example is used to illustrate this possibility and a general equilibrium model calibrated to Australian data suggests that such a result can occur for actual tax structures in use. Copyright 1996 by University of Chicago Press.