Taxes and cash transfers reduce income inequality more in France than elsewhere in the OECD, because of the large size of the flows involved. But the system is complex overall. Its effectiveness could be enhanced in many ways, for example so as to achieve the same amount of redistribution at...

Newspapers are two-sided platforms that sell their product both to readers and advertisers. Media firms in general, and newspapers in particular, are considered important providers of information, culture and language in most countries. Newspapers are therefore given preferential tax treatment....

Unconventional fiscal policy uses announcements of future increases in consumption taxes to generate inflation expectations and accelerate consumption expenditure. It is budget neutral and time consistent. We provide preliminary evidence for the effectiveness of such policies using changes in...

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...

This paper aims to provide a perspective on the ideal tax system using insights from optimal-tax theory supplemented with empirical evidence. These insights are applied to actual policy questions regarding the progressiveness of the labor income tax, in-work tax credits, the design of the...

This paper provides a quantitative analysis of hypothetical replacements of existing tax arrangements applied to superannuation (Australia's term for private pensions) with traditional EET and TEE regimes. These taxation regimes exempt pension fund earnings from any taxation and tax either...

Recently, a voluminous literature estimating the taxable income elasticity has emerged as an important field in empirical public economics. However, to a large extent it is still unknown how the hourly wage rate, an important component of taxable income, reacts to changes in marginal tax rates....

Theoretical discussion on compensating mechanisms involving the Pareto criterion that address inequality rather than absolute welfare is non-existent in trade literature. In a simple HOS model we consider tax-transfer policies that keep the pre-trade degree of inequality unchanged between...

We estimate the responses of gross labor income with respect to marginal and average net-of-tax rates in France over the period 2003-2006. We exploit a series of reforms to the income-tax and payroll-tax schedules affecting individuals who earn less than twice the minimum wage. Our estimate for...

It is common knowledge that mobile individuals are difficult to tax. Governments accommodate these difficulties by granting special tax reductions to mobile individuals as it is expedient to get some tax revenue from these individuals rather than to lose them as tax payers completely. Taxing...