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...

This paper is concerned with the question of how couples should be taxed. One reason for the importance of this issue is simply that the overwhelming majority of individuals live in households formed around couples, and so it could be argued that empirically, this is the single most important...

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...

This paper characterizes the optimal income taxation when individuals respond along both the intensive and extensive margins. Individuals are heterogeneous in two dimensions: their skills and their disutility of participation. Preferences over consumption and work effort can differ with the...

This paper assumes the standard optimal income tax model of Mirrlees (Review of Economic Studies, 1971). It gives fairly mild conditions under which the optimal nonlinear labor income tax profile derived under maximin has higher marginal tax rates than the ones derived with welfarist criteria...

This paper examines optimal redistribution in a model with high and low-skilled individuals with heterogeneous tastes for labor, that either work or not. With such double heterogeneity, traditional Welfarist criteria including Utilitarianism fail to take the compensation-responsibility trade-off...

Two-sided platform firms serve distinct customer groups that are connected through interdependent demand, and include major businesses such as the media industry, banking, and the software industry. A well known result of tax incidence is that consumers of a more heavily taxed good pay a higher...

In this paper, we compare ad valorem and specific taxation under heterogeneous demand when a monopolist offers a menu of two-part tariffs. An increase in either tax rate leads to a higher usage fee for all consumers, whereas the fixed fee under reasonable assumptions will fall. If the government...