Currently U.S. Federal Income Tax schedules do not maintain marriage neutrality, that is, tax liabilities depend upon marital status. This paper shows the extent and distribution of the departure from neutrality both under current law and the new (1981) tax act. The new tax law establishes a...

A number of suggestions have been made to reform the tax treatment of the family. None of these proposals has been accompanied by careful estimates of their effects on the income distribution, revenue collections, and labor supply. The purpose of this paper is to provide such information. Our...

The new tax law increases tax rates of high income individuals, and expands the earned income tax credit for low income individuals. We use a sample of actual tax returns to compute estimates of the 'marriage tax' - the change in couples joint tax upon marriage - under this new law. We predict...

In this essay Professor Cain identifies several instances in which the Internal Revenue Code imposes a penalty on married couples. This penalty occurs for married couples both at the low end and the high end of income levels. She is especially critical of the $10,000 limitation on the...

In this paper we develop a discrete model of optimal taxation of married couples and empirically discuss the optimality of income taxation for this group. To this end, we derive the social welfare function which guarantees that joint taxation of married couples is optimal. We will contrast this...

We evaluate reforms to the U.S. tax system in a dynamic setup with heterogeneous married and single households, and with an operative extensive margin in labor supply. We restrict our model with observations on gender and skill premia, labor force participation of married females across skill...