The normative principle of benefit-based taxation has exerted substantial influence on many areas of public finance, but it has been largely set aside in the modern theoretical approach to optimal income taxation, where welfarist objectives dominate. A prerequisite for that gap to close is the...

Gender-Based Taxation (GBT) satisfies Ramsey's rule of optimality because it taxes at a lower rate the more elastic labor supply of women. This holds when different elasticities between men and women are taken as exogenous. We study GBT in a model in which labor supply elasticities emerge...

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...

This paper evaluates the effects of the earned income tax credit (EITC) on poor families. Exploiting state-level variation in EITCs, we find that the EITC helps families rise above poverty-level earnings. This occurs by inducing labor market entry in families that initially do not have an adult...

We study the effects of minimum wages and the EITC in the post-welfare reform era. For the minimum wage, the evidence points to disemployment effects that are concentrated among young minority men. For young women, there is little evidence that minimum wages reduce employment, with the exception...

The philanthropic sector is highly consequential, particularly in the United States, and the most important policies directed toward this sector are tax policies. Yet most economic analysis of the optimal tax treatment of charitable giving is ad hoc, treating it as a subject unto itself. This...

This paper rethinks the design of the income tax by assuming that the objective of the tax is not to redistribute from rich to poor but instead to provide some insurance to individuals against the uncertainties they face in their future earnings, a motivation for the tax proposed in Buchanan...

This paper analyzes the distortions created by taxation and the features of tax systems that minimize such distortions (subject to achieving other government objectives). It starts with a review of the theory and practice of deadweight loss measurement, followed by characterizations of optimal...

This paper analyzes the optimal treatment of tax expenditures. It develops an optimal tax model where individuals derive utility from spending on a contribution' good such as charitable giving. The contribution good has also a public good effect on all individuals in the economy. The government...

This paper revisits the Atkinson-Stiglitz result on uselessness of commodity taxation in the presence of optimal non-linear income taxation in a more general setup, namely when tastes are heterogeneous. This general analysis displays the key economic assumptions under which the Atkinson-Stiglitz...