In order to alleviate unemployment it is often recommended to reduce social security contributions (SSC) and to compensate for the ensuing loss in revenues by a rise in the value-added tax (VAT). Assuming unemployment to be caused by efficiency wages, it is shown that a balanced-budget shift...

Analysis of the relationship between taxes and self-employment should account for the interplay between responses in self-employment and wage employment. To this end, we estimate a two-state multi-spell duration model which accounts for both observed and unobserved heterogeneity using a large...

Decisions by firms and individuals on the extent of their tax payments have generally been treated as separate choices. Empirically, a positive relationship between corporate and personal income tax evasion can be observed. The theoretical analysis in this paper shows that a manager's decision...

Entrepreneurial activity is often regarded as an engine for economic growth and job creation. Through tax policy, governments possess a potential lever to influence the decisions of economic agents to start and close small businesses. In Germany, the top marginal income tax rates were reduced...

We investigate the effect of personal income tax (PIT) rates on the number of hours entrepreneurs work weekly. Using the rotating panel data from the Annual Social and Economic Supplement of the Current Population Survey from 2003 to 2019, we estimate instrumental variable regressions in first...

Since Aristotle, a vast literature has suggested that economic inequality has important political consequences. Higher inequality is thought to increase demand for government income redistribution in democracies and to discourage democratization and promote class conflict and revolution in...

We examine the revenue and redistributive effects of tax policy reforms in twelve European countries over the decade between the financial crisis and the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, setting them against the implications of a hypothetical system reflecting the extent of fiscal drag...

The elasticities of taxable and broad income are key parameters in tax policy analysis. To examine the large variation in estimates found in the literature, I conduct a comprehensive meta-regression analysis using information from 51 studies containing 1,448 estimates. Heterogeneity in reported...

We decompose the redistributive effect of direct taxes into vertical, horizontal, and reranking components applying the methods of Urban and Lambert (Public Finance Review, 2008). In the first such application to the UK, and using yearly data covering 1977-2020, we find that redistributive...

In October 2007 France introduced an exemption on the income tax and social security contributions that applied to wages received for hours worked overtime. The goal of the policy was to increase the number of hours worked. This article shows that this reform has had no significant impact on...