This paper explores the optimal income tax treatment of couples. Each couple is modelled as a single agent supplying labor along two dimensions: primary-earner and secondary-earner labor supply. We consider fully general nonlinear income tax schedules which creates a multi-dimensional screening...

The existing literature suggests that the concern for economic efficiency calls for individual taxation of married couples with a higher rate on the primary earner. This paper reconsiders the choice of tax unit in the Becker model of household production, which includes previous analyses as...

A central finding of the modern labor market literature is that labor supply responses tend to be concentrated along the extensive margin (labor force participation) rather than the intensive margin (hours of work). Yet, the literature on the marginal cost of public funds (MCF) focuses solely on...

This paper analyses the effects of taxation in New Keynesian economics. The results show that taxes contribute to price and wage stickiness and, moreover, that the resulting fluctuations in welfare are magnified by the presence of taxes. These results are at odds with the old Keynesian idea of...

There currently exist two competing approaches in the literature on the optimal provision of public goods. The standard approach highlights the importance of distortionary taxation and distributional concerns. The new approach neutralizes distributional concerns by adjusting the non-linear...

We decompose changing gaps in life expectancy between rich and poor into differential changes in age-specific mortality rates and differences in “survivability”. Declining age-specific mortality rates increases life expectancy, but the gain is small if the likelihood of living to this age is...

We link survey data containing Danish people’s perceptions of where they rank in various reference groups and fairness views with administrative records on their income history, life events, and reference groups. People know their income positions well, but believe others are closer to...

The distributional consequences of the recent economic crisis are still broadly unknown. While it is possible to speculate which groups are likely to be hardest-hit, detailed distributional studies are still largely backward-looking due to a lack of real-time microdata. This paper studies the...

This paper utilises a multi-country microsimulation tax-benefit model for Europe, EUROMOD, to simulate the distribution of net replacement rates for 13 European countries. We look at different types of labour market transitions by comparing household incomes in the current state with simulated...

This paper presents the case for tax progressivity based on recent results in optimal tax theory. We consider the optimal progressivity of earnings taxation and whether capital income should be taxed. We critically discuss the academic research on these topics and when and how the results can be...