There is clear evidence that fairness plays a role in redistribution. Individuals want tocompensate others for their misfortune, while they allow them to enjoy the fruits of their effort.Such fairness considerations have been introduced in political economy and optimal incometax models with a...

Despite numerous studies on labor supply, the size of elasticities is rarely comparable acrosscountries. In this paper, we suggest the first large-scale international comparison ofelasticities, while netting out possible differences due to methods, data selection and theperiod of investigation....

Income mobility is often thought to equalize permanent incomes and thereby to improvesocial welfare. The welfare analysis of mobility often fails, however, to account for the cost ofthe variability of periodic incomes around permanent incomes. This paper assesses the netwelfare benefit of...

The optimal design of low income support is examined using a structural labour supplymodel. The approach incorporates unobserved heterogeneity, fixed costs of work, childcarecosts and the detailed non-convexities of the tax and transfer system. The analysis considerspurely Pareto improving...

We use micro data from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service to document how households’ taxliabilities vary with income, marital status and the number of dependents. We report facts onthe distributions of average and marginal taxes, properties of the joint distributions of taxespaid and income,...

As the link between tax compliance and tax morale is found to be robust, finding thedeterminants of tax morale can help to understand and fight tax evasion. In this paper weanalyze the effect of progressive taxation on tax morale in a cross-country approach – whichhas not been investigated...

By inverting Saez (2002)’s model of optimal income taxation, we characterize theredistributive preferences of the Irish government between 1987 and 2005. The (marginal)social welfare function revealed by this approach is consistently comparable over time andshow great stability despite...

This paper characterizes optimal income taxation when individuals respond along both theintensive and extensive margins. Individuals are heterogeneous across two dimensions:specifically, their skill and disutility of participation. Preferences over consumption and workeffort can differ with...

Most empirical studies on the impact of labour income taxation on the labour supplybehaviour of households use a unitary modelling approach. In this paper we empiricallyanalyze income taxation and the choice of working hours by combining the collectiveapproach for household behaviour and the...

What are the impacts of labor tax reform on wage setting and employment to keep therelative tax burden per low-skilled and high-skilled workers constant in the case ofheterogenous domestic labor markets, i.e. imperfect competition in low-skilled labor andperfect competition in high-skilled labor...