Various authors, notably Eaton and Rosen (1980a) and Varian (1980), have proposed that income taxation may be justified to some extent on the ground that it serves as social insurance against uncertainties in labor income. They assume that private insurance is unavailable. primarily because of...

A substantial literature addresses the design of transfer programs and policies, including the negative income tax, other means-tested transfers, the earned income tax credit, categorical assistance, and work inducements. This work is largely independent of that on the optimal nonlinear income...

Anti-utilitarian norms often are used in assessing tax systems. Two motivations support this practice. First, many believe utilitarianism to be insufficiently egalitarian. Second, utilitarianism does not give independent weight to other equitable principles, notably concerns that reforms may...

In Fairness versus Welfare, we advance the thesis that social policies should be assessed based entirely on their effects on individuals' well-being. This thesis implies that no independent weight should be accorded to notions of fairness (other than many purely distributive notions). We support...

Should legal rules be chosen only on the basis of their efficiency or also on the basis of their distributional effects? This article demonstrates that redistribution accomplished through legal rules is systematically less efficient than redistribution accomplished through the income tax system...

The federal income tax and major welfare programs do not take into account significant cost-of-living variations among regions. This article considers what adjustments might be appropriate in light of the distributive purposes of tax and welfare systems and concerns about the efficiency of the...

This paper considers the optimal tax treatment of voluntary transfers to individuals in a" framework that integrates redistributive income taxation and estate and gift taxation. Under this" formulation, redistributive considerations become secondary. The optimal tax treatment of" transfers...

This article addresses conceptual issues concerning the distributive incidence of public goods. Solutions depend on the specific purposes for asking the question of distributive incidence notably, assessing the extent to which various public goods should be provided, determining how the...