How much and how to tax high-income individuals is at the core of many recent proposals for incremental as well as fundamental tax reform. This paper critically reviews the economics literature and concludes that the right answer to these questions depends in part on value judgments about which...

Two well-noted phenomena of recent decades are the increasing concentration of personal income and the declining rate of corporate profitability. This paper investigates to what extent these two trends have a common explanation extent these two trends have a common explanation-shifting of income...

Using estate tax return data from 1916 to 1996, we investigate the impact of the estate tax on reported estates, which reflects the impact of the tax on both wealth accumulation and avoidance. An aggregate measure of reported estates is generally negatively correlated with summary measures of...

This paper addresses the modern optimal tax progressivity literature, which clarifies the key role of the behavioral response to taxation and accounts for the incomes of the superrich being qualitatively different than others. Some may be “superstars,” for whom small differences in talent...