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 Handbook entry presents a conceptual, normative overview of the subject of taxation. It emphasizes the relationships among the main functions of taxation—notably, raising revenue, redistributing income, and correcting externalities—and the mapping between these functions and various...

A substantial literature addresses the design of transfer programs and policies, including the negative income tax, other means-tested transfers, the earned income tax credit, categorical assistance, and work inducements. This work is largely independent of that on the optimal nonlinear income...

Specialized theoretical and empirical research should in principle be embedded in a unified framework that identifies the relevant interactions among different phenomena, enables an appropriate matching of policy instruments to objectives, and grounds normative analysis in individuals' utilities...

Various economic literatures address the question whether first-best prescriptions for government policy require modification because redistributive income taxation distorts labor supply and cannot achieve the distributive ideal. Perhaps second-best rules for public goods provision, corrective...

The marginal social value of income redistribution is understood to depend on both the concavity of individuals' utility functions and the concavity of the social welfare function. In the pertinent literatures, notably on optimal income taxation and on normative inequality measurement, it seems...

The marginal social value of income redistribution is understood to depend on both the concavity of individuals' utility functions and the concavity of the social welfare function. In the pertinent literatures, notably on optimal income taxation and on normative inequality measurement, it seems...

This article addresses conceptual issues concerning the distributive incidence of public goods. Solutions depend on the specific purposes for asking the question of distributive incidence - notably, assessing the extent to which various public goods should be provided, determining how the...