Many studies have estimated the effect of taxes on taxable income. To account for nonlinear taxes these studies either use instrumental variables approaches that are not fully consistent, or impose strong functional form assumptions. None allow for general heterogeneity in preferences. In this...

Many studies have estimated the effect of taxes on taxable income. To account for nonlinear taxes these studies either use instrumental variables approaches that are not fully consistent or impose strong functional form assumptions. None allow for general heterogeneity in preferences. In this...

Given the key role of the taxable income elasticity in designing an optimal tax system there are many studies attempting to estimate this elasticity. To account for nonlinear taxes these studies either use instrumental variables approaches that are not fully consistent, or impose strong...

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017 is the most extensive overhaul of the U.S. income tax code since the Tax Reform Act of 1986. Existing estimates of TCJA's economic impact are based on economic projections using pre-TCJA estimates of tax effects. Following recent pioneering work of Zidar...

We explore the implications of heterogeneity in the elasticity of taxable income (ETI) for tax-reform based estimation methods. We theoretically show that existing methods yield elasticities that are biased and lack policy relevance. We illustrate the empirical importance of our theoretical...

The taxable income elasticity is a key parameter for predicting the effect of tax reform or designing an income tax. Bunching at kinks and notches in a single budget set have been used to estimate the taxable income elasticity. We show that when the heterogeneity distribution is unrestricted the...

We extend a standard taxable income model with its typical functional-form assumptions to account for nonlinear budget sets. We propose a new method to estimate taxable income elasticity that is more policy relevant than the typically estimated elasticity based on linearized budget sets. Using...