This paper studies the role of social insurance as a redistributive mechanism in the presence of an optimal (linear or general) income tax. It considers a second-best setting with two unobservable individual characteristics: ability, measured by the wage rate, and risk, measured by the...

This paper studies the optimal non linear income tax of couples. We build a general unitary model of labor supply and allow multidimensional heterogeneity in a discrete type framework. We concentrate our analysis on the resulting intra-family labor allocation of labor supplies and show that this...