Many have advocated the taxation of bequests and gifts as income in order to achieve substantial revenues from unearned wealth and address inequality. There are, though, many drawbacks to the idea of taxing inheritance as part of the beneficiary’s income. Even for those who claim the inclusion...

This paper assesses the feasibility of simulating the distributional impacts produced by various tax and transfer instruments in Viet Nam. Viet Nam's system of tax and transfer policies underwent frequent changes, in terms of diversity and adjustment scope. The most important source of data is...

This paper presents the properties of optimal piecewise linear income tax systems for families based on joint and individual incomes respectively. It models the interaction between the wage rates of mothers as "second earners" and variation in child care prices and productivities as determinants...

Despite our founding vision as a land of opportunity, the United States ranks at or near the bottom among high-income countries in economic equality and inter-generational mobility. Our tax code plays a key role. Inherited income is taxed at less than one-seventh the average tax rate on income...

We study the link between tax progressivity and top income shares. Using variation from large-scale Western tax reforms in the 1980s and 1990s and the novel synthetic control method, we find large and lasting boosting impacts on top income shares from the progressivity reductions. Effects are...

In a number of high-income countries over the past few decades there has been a large growth in income inequality and at the same time a shift in the burden of taxation from the top to the middle of the income distribution. This paper applies the theory of optimal piecewise linear taxation to...

In a number of high-income countries over the past few decades there has been a large growth in income inequality and at the same time a shift in the burden of taxation from the top to the middle of the income distribution. This paper applies the theory of optimal piecewise linear taxation to...

Wealthier households obtain higher returns on their investments than poorer ones. How should the tax system account for this return inequality? I study capital taxation in an economy in which return rates endogenously correlate with wealth. The leading example is a financial market, where the...

This paper studies the optimal top marginal income tax rate in a quantitative framework with entrepreneurial choice, financing constraints, and realistic earnings and wealth distributions. I find that the revenue-maximizing top tax rate is approximately 41 percent — close to the recent levels...

We provide a critique of the standard methodology which bases welfare comparisons between households on deflating household income and consumption by an equivalence scale. We argue that this leads to support for tax/transfer policies that significantly disadvantage low to middle in-come...