This paper presents for the .rst time the properties of optimal piece-wise linear tax systems for two-earner households, based on joint and individual incomes respectively. A key contribution is the analysis of the interaction of second earner wage di¤erences, variation in prices of bought-in...

The Mirrlees Review of the UK tax system, together with its companion volume of research papers, can be expected to influence future discussions of tax reform. Indeed, this can already be recognised in the Henry Review. As far as income taxation is concerned, the most substantive recommendation...

We analyze optimal taxation in an economy with monopsonistic labour markets. The individuals, whose only decisions are whether to work, or not, have heterogeneous productivities and opportunity costs of work. Given its preferences for redistribution, the government, which does not observe the...

We study Downsian competition in a Mirrleesian model of income taxation. The competing politicians may differ in competence. If politicians engage in vote-share maximization, the less competent politician's policy proposals are attractive to the minority of rich agents, whereas those of the...

The paper provides an extension and a new proof of Deaton's theorem on the undesirability of nonuniform excise taxation when income taxes are affine and preferences over consumption goods are separable from labour-leisure choices, homothetic, and identical across agents

The paper provides a new formulation of the Mirrlees-Seade theorem on the positivity of the optimal marginal income tax, under weaker assumptions and in a more general model. The formulation of the theorem is independent of whether the model involves finitely many types or a continuous type...

This paper studies optimal non-linear income taxation in an empirically plausible model with labor supply responses at the intensive (hours, effort) and the extensive (participation) margin. In this model, redistributive taxation gives rise to a previously neglected trade-off between two aspects...

The Mirrleesian model of income taxation restricts attention to simple allocation mechanism with no strategic interdependence, i.e., the optimal labor supply of any one individual does not depend on the labor supply of others. It has been argued by Piketty (1993) that this restriction is...

The Atkinson-Stiglitz (1976) theorem on the undesirability of nonuniform excise taxation when all agents have homogeneous, separable preferences is extended to allow for nonseparability with respect to endogenous variables that will be subject to distortions. The result is useful for analysing...

We study the optimal observability of the tax base within the standard linear income tax problem, where observability is determined by the government’s investment into the accurate measurement of the tax base. We characterize the optimal level of observability and derive a new expression for...