In Germany, there is an ongoing debate about how to increase the efficiency of the social security system and especially its financing. The aim of this paper is to simulate different financing systems for Germany. The introduction of a Liberal British or the Southern Greek financing system...

Existing tax schedules are often overly complex and characterized by discontinuities in the marginal tax burden. In this paper we propose a class of progressive smooth functions to replace personal income tax schedules. These functions depend only on three meaningful parameters, and avoid the...

Studies have shown that the previously growing inequality in China has stabilized and even declined since 2008 (Kanbur et al., 2021), nevertheless, the drivers of the latest trans-formation in income inequality remain to be unraveled. We address this research gap by examining the changes in the...

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 describe methods of combining administrative and survey data to improve the measurement of income. We begin by decomposing the total survey error in the mean of survey reports of dollars received from a government transfer program. We decompose this error into three parts, generalized...