This paper proposes a growth-oriented dual-income tax by combining an allowance for corporate equity with a broadly defined flat tax on personal capital income. Revenue losses are compensated by an increase in the value added tax. The paper demonstrates the neutrality properties of the reform...

Given its significance in practice, the piecewise linear tax system seems to have received disproportionately little attention in the literature on optimal income taxation. This paper offers a simple and transparent analysis of its main characteristics.

Almost all theoretical work on how to calculate the marginal deadweight loss has been done for linear taxes and for variations in linear budget constraints. This is quite surprising since most income tax systems are nonlinear, generating nonlinear budget constraints. Instead of developing the...

We examine how allowing individuals to emigrate to pay lower taxes abroad changes the optimal non-linear income tax scheme in a Mirrleesian economy. An individual emigrates if his domestic utility is less than his utility abroad net of migration costs, utilities and costs both depending on...

Recent research on the behavioral effects of income taxes has to a large extent focused on the elasticity of taxable income with respect to the net-of-tax rate, i.e., one minus the marginal tax rate. We offer new evidence on this matter by making use of a large panel of Swedish tax payers over...

The German Income Tax Reform 2000, which announced a reduction in income tax rates to be implemented in a series of three stages, was welcomed by the public as a step towards unleashing lurking growth potentials. Nonetheless, in the course of the year 2001 a dispute arose, centering around the...

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...

There is often a gap between the prescriptions of an optimal tax system and actual tax systems, some of which can be neither efficient economically nor efficient at redistributing income. With a focus on personal income taxes, this paper reviews the political economics literature on tax systems...

This paper provides new empirical insights on the elasticity of taxable income to the net-oftax rate. Using a panel of German income tax return data, we followed taxpayers from 2001 to 2006 to analyze the effects of the German tax reforms of 2004 and 2005. Implementing a dynamic model as...

This paper provides new empirical insights on the elasticity of taxable income for Germany. Using a rich panel of German income tax return data, the tax reforms of 2004 and 2005 are exploited implementing a new dynamic income model. Showing and discussing potential estimation problems of the...