This paper examines the effective tax rates faced by low income working families. The effective tax rate (ETR) is a generic concept which encompasses both tax payable and also loss of benefits as income rises.

The available empirical evidence indicates that the distribution of private income in Australia is polarising. While there are a number of factors underlying this trend, it is clear that the dramatic swing to "economic rationalist" policies since the mid 1980s has been a major cause of the...

In a number of high-income countries over the past few decades there has been a large growth in income inequality and at the same time a shift in the burden of taxation from the top to the middle of the income distribution. This paper applies the theory of optimal piecewise linear taxation to...

In this study we try to evaluate some of the redistributive aspects of public drug plan for seniors by examining the effects on out-of-pocket expenditures of such drug plan in Canada.

Estimating the rate of return to a university degree has always been difficult due to the problem of omitted variable biases. Benefiting from a special feature of the University Admission system in China, which has clear cutoffs for university entry, combined with a unique data set with...

How are hourly wages affected by the Earned Income Tax Credit? Two strategies are utilized to determine the relationship between the credit and hourly wages. First, I use variation in state EITC supplements, which magnify the effect of the federal EITC. I find that a 10 percent increase in the...

The tax policy agenda in Australia for more than a decade has been largely driven by a perceived need to reduce the level of income taxation and the progression of marginal rates, financing the revenue shortfall with a broad based consumption tax. A major reform of this kind is now being...

This paper considers more major structural reforms which could address such problems in a systematic manner, and allow the implementation of a designed set of effective tax rates (ETRs) for social security clients and taxpayers.

This paper considers options for addressing problems in the way the tax and social security systems interact.