We study reforms of non-linear income tax systems from a political economy perspective. We present a median voter theorem for monotonic tax reforms, reforms so that the change in the tax burden is a monotonic function of income. We also provide an empirical analysis of tax reforms, with a focus...

This paper provides necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of Pareto-improving tax reforms. The conditions can be expressed as sufficient statistics and have a wide range of potential applications in public finance. We discuss one such application in detail: the introduction of...

Are reforms towards individual taxation politically feasible? Are they desirable from a welfare perspective? We develop a method to answer such questions and apply it to the US federal income tax since the 1960s. Main findings are: As of today, Pareto-improvements require a move away from joint...

This paper studies the tax treatment of couples. We develop two different ap-proaches. One is tailored to the analysis of tax systems that stick to the principle that the tax base for couples is the sum of their incomes. One is tailored to the analysis of reforms toward individual taxation. We...

We study a market in which k identical and indivisible objects are allocated using a uniform-price auction where n k bidders each demand one object. Before the auction, each bidder receives an informative but imperfect signal about the state of the world. The good that is auctioned is a...

This paper studies a large majority election with voters who have heterogeneous, private preferences and exogenous private signals. We show that a Bayesian persuader can implement any state-contingent outcome in some equilibrium by providing additional information. In this setting, without the...

In an economic theory of voting, voters have positive or negative costs of voting in favor of a proposal and positive or negative benefits from an accepted proposal. When votes have equal weight then simultaneous voting mostly has a unique pure strategy Nash equilibrium which is independent of...

A uniform price for carbon is at the center of market-based approaches to climate policy. Actual climate policy, by contrast, has many sector-specific rules. This paper studies the desirability of the market-based approach using tools from the theory of taxation. It is found that a justification...

We study the optimal design of student financial aid as a function of parental income. We derive optimal financial aid formulas in a general model. For a simple model version, we derive mild conditions on primitives under which poorer students receive more aid even without distributional...

This paper shows that agent inattention to taxes generates a time-inconsistency problem in the choice of tax policy. In equilibrium, inattention leads to inefficiently high tax rates and a taxation bias emerges. Combining structural and sufficient statistics approaches, we quantify the magnitude...