Public school finance equalization programs can be characterized by the change they impose on the tax price of an additional dollar of local school spending. I calculate the tax price of spending for each school district in the United States for 1972, 1982, and 1992. I find that using the actual...

Anti-utilitarian norms often are used in assessing tax systems. Two motivations support this practice. First, many believe utilitarianism to be insufficiently egalitarian. Second, utilitarianism does not give independent weight to other equitable principles, notably concerns that reforms may...

Liberal egalitarians argue that the state is justified in taxing members of a political community to achieve distributive justice and ensure political equality and regime stability. This involves an uneasy compromise between equality and efficiency, a compromise that many argue has recently been...

How much and how to tax high-income individuals is at the core of many recent proposals for incremental as well as fundamental tax reform. This paper critically reviews the economics literature and concludes that the right answer to these questions depends in part on value judgments about which...

Alan Auerbach and Kevin Hassett offer a new measure of horizontal equity (HE) that is designed to overcome deficiencies in prior indexes. There is, however, a fundamental problem that their effort shares with their predecessors' attempts: the underlying rationale for pursuing HE at the expense...

The National tax laws and international tax policies have, despite impressive growth performances in many economies, worked against economic gender equality. The broad concept of tax fairness has become equivalent to what is good for economic growth and detached from social justice, leading to...

Much criticism of the income tax involves administration: the enormous complexity of the system is responsible for large compliance costs, public and private, and the tax gap is large despite substantial resources devoted to enforcement. The desire for simplification and improved compliance...

This paper elaborates on different conceptions of justice. Economic justice aims at correcting market outcomes to warrant a fair distribution of resources, whereas tax justice focuses on the fair distribution of the tax burden. Both elements of distributive justice have their own...

Recent times have seen growing calls for considerations of justice to be given a greater role in international tax law. The main driver of these calls are distributive concerns, although agreement is still missing as to what this means in terms of both principle and practice. This article asks...

Tax justice advocates have spent the past decade building public consciousness about the tax planning practices of financial elites and large multinational corporations. They approached the project from a series of angles, from grassroots name-and-shame campaigns to documentary filmmaking to...