The apparent ubiquity of progressive taxation in advanced democracies has animated research by political economists in the past decade, but little progress has been made in modeling political equilibria over tax policy when labor supply is elastic with respect to taxation. Here, we postulate an...

In this paper we apply the meta-regression technique to survey the empirical literature on the economic incidence of labour taxes and social security contributions. In particular, we focus on the effects of taxation on wages to test the conventional view that employees bear the burden due to...

This paper offers estimates of the underreporting of income by selfemployed workers using the Spanish household surveys over the period 2006–2009. We replicate the well-known approach by Pissarides and Weber (J Public Econ 39(1):17–32, 1989) but extending its interpretation for admitting...

This paper analyzes the effects of personal income tax progressivity on long-run economic growth, income inequality and social welfare. The quantitative implications of income tax progressivity increments are illustrated for the US economy under three main headings: individual effects (reduced...

Can the Spanish government generate more tax revenue by making personal income taxes more progressive? To answer this question, we build a life-cycle economy with uninsurable labor productivity risk and endogenous labor supply. Individuals face progressive taxes on labor and capital incomes and...

Is the Spanish economy positioned at its optimal progressivity level in personal income tax? This article quantifies the aggregate, distributional, and welfare consequences of moving toward such an optimal level. A heterogeneous households general equilibrium model featuring both life cycle and...

We study how taxable income responds to changes in marginal tax rates, using as a main source of identifying variation three large reforms to the Spanish personal income tax implemented in the period 1999-2014. The most reliable estimates of the elasticity of taxable income (ETI) with respect to...

In this paper, we use administrative data on tax returns to characterize the distributions of before- and after-tax income, tax liabilities and tax credits in Spain for individuals and households. We use the most recent available data, 2015 for individuals and 2013 for households, but also...

This paper contributes to the literature on majority voting over fiscal policies. We depart from the standard model in two dimensions. First, besides redistributing income, the government uses the net tax revenue to finance the provision of goods and services that become in-kind transfers to the...

In a model where individuals differ in both their health care needs and their lifestyle preferences, we examine the fair provision of health care when those who regret their initial decisions are granted a fresh start. By considering that each agent chooses how to allocate a given amount of...