A framework is provided for assessing the impact of social programs on welfare using two summary statistics: the mean benefit of the program and a distributional term (the Gini income elasticity of the program). The distributional term is itself decomposed into two components. The first...

The success of public policies often turns on their distributional impacts. Policy analyses often compare inequality before and after the policy change, but such global estimates are sensitive to the ordering of income sources. This article presents a method for estimating distributional effects...

A simple model of tax evasion is presented leading to the following conclusions: (1) Tax evasion is a function of, inter alia, the marginal tax rate only if the probability of being caught is a function of undeclared income; (2) Tax evasion introduces uncertainty, which causes a utility loss. An...

This article uses the variation in U.S. state income tax systems to examine what engenders tax complexity. An analysis of simple measures of the variation in complexity, based on the number of lines in the tax forms and the number of pages in the instruction booklets, reveals some intriguing...

This article develops a simulation model of a growing economy where house-holds make life cycle consumption decisions and also choose whether to own or rent housing. A major feature of the model is that newly formed households face a down-payment constraint which may limit the amount of housing...

The purpose of the research reported here was to see whether the accumu-lated evidence since 1979 is consistent with the hypothesis that the capital gains tax cuts in the Revenue Act of 1978 caused an increased volume of stock transactions. Transactions volume on the New York Stock Exchange,...

This article provides estimates of the probable saving in the resource cost of complying with the tax law that would result from simplifying the individual Abstract income tax law. These estimates are based on an econometric analysis of the tax-filing behavior in 1982 of a sample of Minnesota...