We use micro data from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service to document how households' tax liabilities vary with income, marital status and the number of dependents. We report facts on the distributions of average and marginal taxes, properties of the joint distributions of taxes paid and income,...

Based on well-known evidence on labor supply elasticities, several authors have concluded that women should be taxed at lower rates than men. We evaluate the quantitative implications of taxing women at a lower rate than men. Relative to the current system of taxation, setting a proportional tax...

Using the TAXSIM model for the period 1962-95, we consider the federal tax system's impact as an automatic stabilizer. Despite the many changes in the tax system, there has been relatively little change in its role as an automatic stabilizer. We estimate that individual federal taxes offset...

In this paper, we propose a new measure of horizontal equity that overcomes many of the shortcomings of previous proposed measures. Our starting point is the observation that a well-behaved social welfare function need not evaluate global' (vertical equity) differences in after-tax income using...

This paper analyzes the distortions created by taxation and the features of tax systems that minimize such distortions (subject to achieving other government objectives). It starts with a review of the theory and practice of deadweight loss measurement, followed by characterizations of optimal...

dramatically with aggregate annuity purchases reaching $159.3 billion in 1995. While many annuities are job-related, by 1994 individual annuity purchases outside of job-related retirement plans had grown to $51 billion. This paper uses state-level data on annuity premiums for 1984-93 to explore...

As a tax base, 'consumption' is sometimes argued to be less fair than 'income' because the benefits of not taxing capital income accrue to high-income households. We argue that, despite the common perception that consumption taxation eliminates all taxes on capital income, consumption and income...

Using cross-sectional data for blue and white collar workers for U.S. cities, we examine how the tax treatment of fringe benefits affects whether employers offer benefits. Differences in state-level income taxes cause variation across places in the tax incentives for fringe benefits. We find...

The optimal income tax problem, since it requires self-selection constraints which define nonconvex feasible sets, is one of the many problems in economics for which randomization in the solution may be desirable. For a two-class economy. we characterize the optimal random tax schedules and we...