Among OECD countries, the Netherlands has average female labor force participation, but by far the highest rate of part-time work. This paper investigates the extent to which married women respond to financial incentives. We exploit the exogenous variation caused by a substantial Dutch tax...

In October 2007 France introduced an exemption on the income tax and social security contributions that applied to wages received for hours worked overtime. The goal of the policy was to increase the number of hours worked. This article shows that this reform has had no significant impact on...

In this Paper, we formulate and estimate a structural, static model of household labour supply and multiple welfare programme participation. Given the complicated nature of both the income tax schedule and the benefit rules for different welfare programmes, we use unique access to a very...

Disposable income inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient and using Family Budget Survey data, increased very little, and by a similar amount, from 1989–93 in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. This surprising result is examined with an analysis of changes in the channels of...

This paper develops a simple theoretical model that can be implemented to estimate the willingness to pay for distributive justice. We derive a formula that allows one to recover the willingness to pay for distributive justice from the estimated coefficients of a probit regression and fiscal...

This paper studies the effect of top tax rates on inventors' mobility since 1977. We put special emphasis on "superstar" inventors, those with the most and most valuable patents. We use panel data on inventors from the United States and European Patent Offices to track inventors' locations over...

There is often a gap between the prescriptions of an "optimal" tax system and actual tax systems, some of which can be neither efficient economically nor efficient at redistributing income. With a focus on personal income taxes, this paper reviews the political economics literature on tax...

We study how the market for innovation affects enforcement of patent rights. Conventional wisdom associates the gains from trade with comparative advantage in manufacturing or marketing. We show that these gains imply that patent transactions should increase litigation risk. We identify a new...

A worker can contribute pre-tax dollars to a private pension plan. Under a progressive tax, this feature reduces income taxes. Ippolito (1986} argues that an individual in 1979 can reduce lifetime taxes by 20%. We re-examine his analysis using the complete time-series of US income tax history...

We estimate the effect of estate taxation on bequests exploiting a sequence of Italian reforms that culminated with the reduction of estate taxes in 1999 and their abolishment in 2001. To perform our exercise, we use the 1993-2006 Survey of Household Income and Wealth, which has data on real...