This paper investigates the politicians' incentives to pursue income redistribution when governments are constrained to levy taxes on labor income and this creates distortions. Politicians who strive to be elected may strategically redistribute through in-kind rather than cash transfers and...

There is often a gap between the prescriptions of an 'optimal' tax system and actual tax systems, some of which can be neither efficient economically nor efficient at redistributing income. With a focus on personal income taxes, this paper reviews the political economics literature on tax...

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...

We examine how the introduction of self-control preferences influences the trade-off between two fundamental components of a public pension system: the contribution rate and its degree of redistribution. The pension regime affects individuals' welfare by altering how yielding to temptation (i.e....

In this paper we compute the optimal tax and education policy transition in an economy where progressive taxes provide social insurance against idiosyncratic wage risk, but distort the education decision of households. Optimally chosen tertiary education subsidies mitigate these distortions. We...

This paper presents new empirical evidence on taxpayers' responsiveness to taxation by estimating the compensated elasticity of taxable income with respect to the net-of-tax rate in the Netherlands. Applying the bunching approach introduced by Saez (2010), we find small, but clear evidence of...

We look at the theory of arbitrage with taxation under certainty. The tax scale in our model is not linear. Under the premise that tax scale is convex, we analyze prices that do not exhibit arbitrage opportunities. It turns out that there are two kinds of arbitrage: unbounded as well as bounded...

The markets for talent often produce large income inequality and therefore raise political attention. While such inequality can be due to superstar dynamics or factor complementarities, Terviö ("Superstars and Mediocrities: Market Failure in The Discovery of Talent", the Review of Economic...

There is much evidence that relative income concern reduces subjective wellbeing and raises labour supply - "keeping up with the Joneses" (KUJ), while increasing use of social media and growing inequality encourage comparison. Models with one or two agent-types generally miss the policy relevant...

The public finance literature has modeled income shifting as a decision along the intensive margin even though it involves significant fixed costs, giving rise to an important extensive margin. We show that accounting for this extensive margin has crucial policy implications: the classical...