This paper estimates taxable income responses using a series of Danish tax reforms and population-wide administrative data since 1980. The tax variation and data in Denmark makes it possible to overcome the biases from nontax changes in inequality and mean reversion that plague the existing...

This paper uses data from the universe of tax returns filed between 2001 and 2010 to test whether parents shift the timing of childbirth around the New Year to gain tax benefits. Filers have an incentive to shift births from early January into late December, through induction or cesarean...

Martin Feldstein's (1999) widely used taxable income formula for deadweight loss assumes the marginal social cost of evasion and avoidance equals the tax rate. This condition is likely to be violated in practice for two reasons. First, some of the costs of evasion and avoidance are transfers to...

This paper reports the results of a 2007 experiment testing whether specific process simplification can foster increased take-up rates for savings products, particularly by low-to-moderate income (LMI) households. Tax refund recipients at certain H&R Block tax preparation offices were given the...

With heterogeneity in both skills and discount factors, the Atkinson- Stiglitz theorem that savings should not be taxed does not hold. In a model with heterogeneity of preferences at each earnings level, introducing a savings tax on high earners or a savings subsidy on low earners increases...

This paper estimates the effect of tax incentives for charitable contributions in France. We focus on two reforms that increased the nonrefundable tax credit rate for charitable contributions by 32 percent. We use a difference-in-difference identification, comparing the evolution of...

The earned income tax credit generates large average tax refunds for low-income parents, and these refunds are distributed in a narrow time frame. I rely on this plausibly exogenous source of variation in liquidity to investigate the effect of cash on hand on unemployment duration. Among...

I analyze the optimal taxation of profits and labor income under endogenous firm formation. Individuals differ in their skill and cost of setting up a firm, and can become workers or entrepreneurs. A tax system in which profits and labor income are subject to the same schedule uses general...

I present a simple and tractable model of the optimal taxation of married couples, working off of the multidimensional screening framework of Armstrong and Rochet (1999). In particular, I study how the tax code varies with the degree of assortative mating. One result is that the "negative...

This paper uses the interwar United States as a laboratory for investigating the incentive effects of marginal income tax rates. We examine the impact of the large changes in rates in this period on taxable income using time-series/cross-section analysis of data by small slices of the income...