The literature on tax systems generally considers each type of tax in a self-contained way, with its own distributive characteristics. While the income tax is considered as a progressive tax, social insurance contributions are seen as being regressive, namely because of ceilings. Using a...

I analyze the role of the distribution of skills in shaping optimal nonlinear income tax schedules. I use theoretical skill distributions as well as empirical skill distributions for 14 OECD countries. I find that a more dispersed log-normal skill distribution implies a more progressive optimal...

There is confusion in the literature concerning the relationship between income inequality and redistribution in a cross-country perspective. The reason for this is that different contributions in the literature are not referring to the same characteristic. This is shown by addressing...

Piketty's rg implies an increase in capital-output ratio and in the share of capital income in net output. But it still does not guarantee the increase in personal income inequality. We derive the conditions for the "pass-through" of the rise in the share of capital income to greater personal...

We examine empirically the relationship between the extent of redistribution and the components of the Mirrlees framework, with a focus on inherent inequality and government’s redistributive preferences. We have constructed our income distribution variables from the Luxembourg Income Study...

Gender difference in taxation is generally understudied, especially in sociologyliterature, which often overlooks taxation as a social phenomenon.While a small literature, studies on gender and taxation from a wider range of disciplines have offered and tested some core mechanisms producing...

The paper uses the flexibility of household survey data to align their income categories and recipient units with the income categories and units found in data produced by tax authorities. Our analyses, based on a standardized definition of fiscal income, allow us to locate, for top-income...

Consumption taxes are often considered as the most anti-redistributive component of the tax system. Yet, very few estimates, and fewer international comparisons of the redistributive impact of consumption taxes exist in the literature, due to scarce data on household expenditures. We use...

This article introduces fiscal impoverishment as a novel framework for comparative poverty research. We invert standard analyses of welfare state policy and household poverty by focusing not on poverty alleviation but poverty creation and exacerbation. Using harmonized household survey data, we...

We examine the effects of globalization on the size and composition of tax revenues, worker-specific tax burdens, and effective average labor income tax rates using a unique international database on income tax calculators. We find that due to increasing mobility of firms and high-income...