We review and evaluate some recent contributions on modeling entrepreneurship within a neoclassical framework, analyzing how and to what extent the fundamental ingredients suggested in the social science literature were captured. We show how these approaches are important in stressing the main...

I study the link between taxes and youth self-employment. I make use of a Swedish reform, implemented in 2007-09, which suddenly made the payroll tax and the self-employment tax vary by age. The results suggest that youth self-employment is insensitive to tax reductions, both in the short run...

Does tax policy affect the rate of self-employment in a modern welfare state? This question is analyzed empirically based on Swedish data for the entire post-war period. Available tax data indicate that payroll taxes have had a negative influence on the unincorporated rate of self-employment,...

I study the link between taxes and youth self-employment. I make use of a Swedish reform, implemented in 2007-09, which suddenly made the payroll tax and the self-employment tax vary by age. The results suggest that youth self-employment is insensitive to tax reductions, both in the short run...

Recent experimental studies suggest that risk aversion is negatively related to cognitive ability. In this paper we report evidence that this relation might be spurious. We recruit a large subject pool drawn from the general Danish population for our experiment. By presenting subjects with...

The objective of this essay is to study to what extent parents divide their estates unequally between their children and the determinants of this decision. We use a new dataset based on the estate reports for almost 70,000 Swedish widows, widowers, divorcees and unmarried individuals who died...

We compile data spanning the period 1900-2014 and up to 30 countries to study long-run patterns in the tax elasticity of top incomes. Our results show that top tax elasticities vary tremendously over time; they were medium-to-low before 1950, virtually zero during the postwar era up to 1980 and...

We study the link between tax progressivity and top income shares. Using variation from large-scale Western tax reforms in the 1980s and 1990s and the novel synthetic control method, we find large and lasting boosting impacts on top income shares from the progressivity reductions. Effects are...

This paper develops a comprehensive framework for analyzing the revenue, efficiency and social welfare implications of top income taxation. It generalizes the Saez (2001) formula for the optimal top tax rate by deriving analytical expressions for the Laffer curve and excess burden. Applied to...

More recently researchers have turned to analyze how the tax structure, rather than the overall tax level, affects economic performance. For instance, several papers have investigated how taxation on corporate and individual (labor) income influences growth. Taxation of dividend income may also...