The elasticity of taxable income (ETI) is often interpreted as a sufficient statistic to assess the welfare costs of taxation. Building on the conceptual framework of Chetty (2009), we show that this assertion does no longer hold for tax systems with deduction possibilities if (i) deductions...

There exists a wide variety of tax treatments of pensions across the world. And the reasons for such a range of regimes are not clear. This note reviews the general principles of pension taxes and analyses the theoretical foundations of why pension incomes ought to be taxed specifically. To do...

We derive a sufficient statistics optimal tax formula in a general model that incorporates unemployment and endogenous wages, to study the shape of the tax and transfer system at the bottom of the distribution. The sufficient statistics are the macro employment response to taxation and the micro...

The optimal design of low income support is examined using a structural labour supply model. The approach incorporates unobserved heterogeneity, fixed costs of work, childcare costs and the detailed non-convexities of the tax and transfer system. The analysis considers purely Pareto improving...

In this paper we use a panel of 189 countries to describe the salient trends that have emerged in national personal income tax systems spanning the twenty five year period from 1981 to 2005. Using complete national income tax schedules, we calculate actual average and marginal tax rates at...

The purpose of SWEtaxben is to evaluate the impact of changes in the tax/benefit systems on households as well as the central governmental budget. Relating to the micro simulation literature this model can be labeled a static micro simulation model with behavioral changes. This behavioral change...

Does tax evasion run in the family? To answer this question, we study the case of the commuter tax allowance in Austria. This allowance is designed as a step function of the distance between the residence and the workplace, creating sharp discontinuities at each bracket threshold. The distance...

Welfare programs are important for reducing poverty but create incentives for recipients to maximize their income by either reducing labor supply or manipulating taxable income. In this paper, we quantify the extent of such behavioral responses for the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) in the US....

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is a central component of the U.S. safety net, benefiting about 27 million families. Using variation in the federal and state EITC, this paper evaluates the long-term impact of EITC exposure during childhood on the health of young adults. We find that an...

Using Difference-in-Differences models and event-study analysis, we estimate the impact of an exogenous increase in income on the incidence and intensity of intimate partner violence (IPV). Using National Crime Victimization Survey data from 1992 to 2000, we exploit time and family-size...