This paper begins with a survey of the literature on the political economy approaches to labor income taxation. We focus on recent progress made by examining in detail the specific properties of non-linear taxes derived in the context of voting. Next, we present new results on the existence of...

This paper studies the tax treatment of couples. We develop two different approaches. One is tailored to the analysis of tax systems that stick to the principle that the tax base for couples is the sum of their incomes. One is tailored to the analysis of reforms toward individual taxation. We...

We present a conceptual framework for the analysis of politically feasible tax reforms. First, we prove a median voter theorem for monotonic reforms of non-linear tax systems. This yields a characterization of reforms that are preferred by a majority of individuals over the status quo and hence...