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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

The openness to international trade and capital movements of industrialized countries has increased substantially during the recent decades. At the same time, most of these countries experienced a rise in income dispersion. Against this background, the paper analyzes empirically whether the...

We explore the extent to which LIS-data can be used to shed light on the presence of women in the top of the income distribution. We show developments of the share of women in top groups (P90-100 and P99-100) of the labour income distribution for 28 countries and, when possible, compare to...