This paper studies the design of couples' income taxation. Consumption and labor supply decisions within the couple are made by maximizing a weighted sum of the spouses’ utilities; bargaining weights are given but specific to each couple. The information structure and labor supply decisions...

Atkinson and Stiglitz show that with weakly separability, differential commodity taxes are unnecessary given an optimal nonlinear income tax. Deaton showed that with an optimal linear progressive income tax, commodity taxes are superfluous under weakly separable and linear Engel curves. Using...

This paper begins with a survey of the literature on the political economy approaches to labor income taxation. We focus on recent progress made by examining in detail the specific properties of non-linear taxes derived in the context of voting. Next, we present new results on the existence of...