Using German income distribution in 2009, this paper studies the redistributive and revenue effects of bracket creep under various inflation scenarios. We develop a tax micro-simulation model for the newly available Panel on Household Finance (PHF) data. The simulation yields an inverted...

We analyze the distributive justice of the combined burden of income taxes, social security taxes and public transfers on employee households in the United States on the federal level and in six member states. To investigate whether the treatment of families by the aggregate tax and transfer...

We show how normative standpoints determine optimal taxation of wealth. Since wealth is not equal to capital, we find very different welfare implications of land rent-, bequest- and capital taxation. It is mainly land rents that should be taxed. We develop an overlapping generations model with...

This paper examines whether income transparency - the public release of citizens' income information - affects support for redistribution. We leverage a quasi-experiment in Finland, where every year on the so-called tax day, the authorities release income information on Finland's top earners to...

In recent decades, the immigration of workers and refugees to Europe has increased substantially, and the composition of the population in many countries has consequently become much more heterogeneous in terms of ethnic background. If people exhibit in-group bias in the sense of being more...

A large literature has documented top income share series based on income tax statistics using the common methodology established by Piketty (2001, 2003). The disappearance of capital income from the income tax base in many countries poses a major challenge to the comparability of these series...

We exploit an exhaustive administrative dataset that includes the individual tax returns of all households in the top percentile of the income distribution in Germany to pin down the effective income taxation of households with very high incomes. Taking tax base erosion into account, we find...

This paper provides formulas for optimal top marginal tax rates when couples are taxed according to income splitting between spouses, consumption is taxed, and the skill distribution is unbounded. Optimal top marginal income tax rates are computed for Germany using a dataset that includes the...

This report analyses the economic consequences of the coronavirus pandemic and support policies using underutilized data sources from the Swedish Tax Agency’s tax register, which provides real-time information on firm sales and employees’ wage income. Firms' sales, particularly in areas...

This paper estimates income tax underreporting for the case of Germany, by income category and along the income distribution. Comparing weighted samples of survey and tax data, we find patterns that are in line with the literature: Average income from self-employment and from rent and lease in...