This paper studies how differences in labor market regulations shape countries' comparative advantage in the cross-border provision of labor-intensive services, using administrative data in Europe for the last two decades. I exploit exogenous variation in labor taxes and minimum wages faced by...

We study the optimal taxation of expenditures that generate income while also serving a consumption function. We characterize the Pareto optimal income tax deduction for such mixed-purpose expenditures within a generalized Atkinson-Stiglitz model. Pareto optimality requires a partial deduction...

Tax benefits tied to children form a central component of the social safety net in the United States. To participate in these programs, taxpayers must claim a child on their tax return. We study the claiming of children on tax returns by drawing on health insurance information returns to...

What are the macroeconomic effects of tax adjustments in response to large public debt shocks in highly integrated economies? The answer from standard closed-economy models is deceptive, because they underestimate the elasticity of capital tax revenues and ignore cross-country spillovers of tax...

This paper computes the optimal progressivity of the income tax code in a dynamic general equilibrium model with household heterogeneity in which uninsurable labor productivity risk gives rise to a nontrivial income and wealth distribution. A progressive tax system serves as a partial substitute...

In the absence of distortionary tax and spending policies, freer immigration and trade for a country would often be supported by similar groups thanks to similar impacts on labor income. But government policies that redistribute income may alter the distributional politics. In particular,...

Under the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001, most U.S. taxpayers received a tax rebate between July and September, 2001. The week in which the rebate was mailed was based on the second-to-last digit of the taxpayer's Social Security number, a digit that is effectively...

Guided by a simple theory of task assignment and time allocation, we investigate the long run response to national differences in tax rates on labor income, payrolls and consumption. The theory implies that higher tax rates reduce work time in the market sector, increase the size of the shadow...

Should the assessment of government policies, such as the provision of public goods and the control of externalities, deviate from first-best principles to account for distributive effects and for the distortionary cost of labor income taxation? For example, is the optimal extent of public goods...

An important result due to Atkinson and Stiglitz (1976) is that differential commodity taxation is not optimal in the presence of an optimal nonlinear income tax (given weak separability of utility between labor and all consumption goods). This article demonstrates that their conclusion holds...