Over the last few years concern for income inequality in European countries has increased remarkably. In this context, taxation is an important redistributive instrument and we investigate the redistributive role of direct taxes. We focus on the EU-15 countries and the evolution over the period...

We study the impact of tax policy on wage negotiations, workers' effort, employment, output and welfare when workers' effort is only imperfectly observable. We show that the different wage-setting motives - rent sharing and effort incentives - reinforce the effects of partial tax policy measures...

It is analyzed the impacts of outsourcing cost and wage tax progression under labor market imperfections with Nash wage bargaining and flexible outsourcing. With sufficiently strong (weak) labor market imperfection, lower outsourcing cost has a wage-moderating (wage-increasing) effect so that...

What are the impacts of labor tax reform on wage setting and employment to keep the relative tax burden per low-skilled and high-skilled workers constant in the case of heterogeneous domestic labor markets, i.e. imperfect competition in low-skilled labor and perfect competition in high-skilled...

Half of the jobs in the U.S. feature pay-for-performance. We study nonlinear income taxation in a model where such contracts arise in private labor markets that are constrained by moral hazard frictions. We derive novel formulas for the incidence of arbitrarily nonlinear reforms of a given tax...

This paper embeds analysis of fiscal redistribution (FR) within the standard social welfare framework. Differences in FR are decomposed into differences in the magnitude (fiscal effort) and progressivity (fiscal progressivity) of transfers. Progressivity is further decomposed into differences in...

The contribution Bach, Corneo, and Steiner (2008) has argued that the rich" do not pay taxes adequately in relation to their income, finding, for instance, an effective tax rate of only 38.1% for the 0.001% fractile of German income taxpayers in 2001. This result contrasts sharply with the...

We analyze the taxation of top personal incomes in Germany on the basis of an integrated data file of individual tax returns and a general household survey for the years 1992 - 2002. The unique feature of this integrated data set is that it includes all taxpayers in the top percentile of the...

This paper analyzes the evolution of tax progressivity in Sweden from both annual and lifetime perspectives. Using a rich micro panel with administrative records of incomes, taxes and benefits over the period 1968-2009, we calculate tax rates across the income distribution accounting for...

Deutschland wird häufig ein im europäischen Vergleich überdurchschnittliches Abgabenniveau bescheinigt. Da dies als eine der Hauptursachen für vergleichsweise schwaches Wachstum und hohe Arbeitslosigkeit gilt, werden in der wirtschaftspolitischen Debatte vermehrt Reformen des progressiven...