Starting with Vickrey (1945) and Mirrlees (1971), the optimal tax literature has studied the design of a personal income tax. The assumed ideal would be to tax earnings ability. Earnings ability is unobservable for tax purposes, however. Past papers have focused instead on designing a tax on...

We consider an economy with intrahousehold inequality where household public goods like child care or care of the elderly are produced at home using time. Noncooperative behavior determines an inefficiently low provision of such goods, and the presence of contribution productivity differentials...

This chapter gives an overview of the male labour supply literature, focusing on what that literature implies for the design of the tax-transfer system. According to conventional wisdom, male labour supply is rather insensitive to tax rates. This, in turn, implies that the welfare losses from...

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 forms...