We provide an overview of microsimulation approaches for assessing the effects of policy on income distribution. We focus on the role of tax-benefit policies and review the concept of microsimulation and how it contributes to the analysis of income distribution in general and policy evaluation...

A fundamental result in the theory of commodity taxation is that taxes increase consumer prices and reduce supply, aggravating the distortions caused by market power. This result hinges on the assumption that each firm provides a single product. We study the effects of commodity taxes in...

We consider an unhealthy good, such as a sugar-sweetened beverage, the health damages of which are misperceived by consumers. The sugar content is endogenous. We first study the solution under “pseudo” perfect competition. In that case a simple Pigouvian tax levied per unit of output but...

The taxation of bequests can have a positive impact on the labor supply of heirs through wealth effects. This leads to an increase in future labor income tax revenue on top of direct bequest tax revenue. We first show in a theoretical model that a simple back-of-the-envelope calculation, based...

This paper studies the implications of monopsony power for optimal income taxation and welfare. Firms observe workers’ abilities while the government does not and monopsony power determines what share of the labor market surplus is translated into profits. Monopsony power increases the tax...

Empirical welfare analyses often impose stringent parametric assumptions on individuals’ preferences and neglect unobserved preference heterogeneity. In this paper, we develop a framework to conduct individual and social welfare analysis for discrete choice that does not suffer from these...

We analyze the welfare implications of property taxation. Using a sufficient statistics approach, we show that the tax incidence depends on how housing prices, labor and other types of incomes as well as public services respond to property tax changes. Empirically, we exploit the German...

This paper develops a machine-learning method that allows researchers to estimate heterogeneous treatment effects with panel data in a setting with many covariates. Our method, which we name the dynamic causal forest (DCF) method, extends the causal-forest method of Wager and Athey (2018) by...

This paper studies the design of tax systems that implement a planner's second-best allocation in a market economy. An example shows that the widely used Mirrleesian (1976) tax system cannot implement all incentive-compatible allocations. Hammond's (1979) "principle of taxation" proves that any...