This paper reviews the literature on optimal taxation of labour income and the empirical work on labour supply and the elasticity of taxable income in Sweden. It also presents an overview of Swedish taxation of labour income, offers calculations on the development in effective marginal tax rates...

There is a lack of clear evidence of the ways in which dividend taxation affects dividend distributions and investment since the evidence is based mainly on the behaviour of large listed companies. This paper utilises a large register-based panel data set, where the vast majority of firms are...

This paper analyses the optimal tax policy and public provision of private goods when individuals differ in two respects: income-earning ability and rationality. Publicly provided goods should be overprovided or subsidised, relative to the decentralised optimum, if society’s marginal valuation...

Low-wage subsidies are often proposed as a solution to the unemployment problem among the low skilled. Yet the empirical evidence on the effects of low-wage subsidies is surprisingly scarce. This paper examines the employment effects of a Finnish payroll tax subsidy scheme, which is targeted at...

Atkinson and Stiglitz (Journal of Public Economics 1976) show that when the government has access to non-linear income taxation and consumer preferences are separable between consumption and leisure, there is no need for differentiated commodity taxation. This paper examines the empirical...

Existing evidence of inequality aversion relies on data from class-room experiments where subjects face hypothetical questions. This paper estimates the magnitude of inequality aversion using representative survey data, with questions related to the real-economy situations the respondents face....

Using register-based panel data covering all Finnish firms in 1999-2004, we examine how corporations anticipated the 2005 dividend tax increase via changes in their dividend and investment policies. The Finnish capital and corporate income tax reform of 2005 creates a useful opportunity to...

Research in behavioral economics has uncovered the widespread phenomenon of people making decisions against their own good intentions. In these situations, the government might want to intervene, indeed individuals might want the government to intervene, to induce behavior that is closer to what...

Dual income tax systems have become increasingly popular; yet, relatively little is known about the consequences of implementing such tax systems. This paper uses a representative panel of taxpayers from the 1993 Finnish tax reform to measure how overall taxable income and the relative shares of...

This paper examines the effects of health-oriented food tax reforms on the distribution of tax payments, food demand and health outcomes. Unlike earlier work, we also take into account the uncertainty related to both demand estimation and health estimates and report the confidence intervals for...