When a Canadian expects to face higher tax rates in the future, where should savings be put? The standard advice is… ‘when you expect your marginal tax rate to rise in the future, contribute to a Registered Retirement Savings Plan (RRSP) now, but delay claiming the tax deduction'. This paper...

Assuming that higher traveling expenses reduce traveling time, this paper considers reliefs for traveling expenses to work when a distorting wage tax is levied. While the decision on traveling expenses would not be distorted if traveling costs were completely deductible, taxation would still not...

This paper proposes the question whether or not traveling expenses to work should be deductible from the income tax base. In order to answer this question, a simple model of (im-) perfect household and worker mobility is employed. The focus of the analysis is on the efficient use of land and the...

Estates and trusts are recognizing growing amounts of taxable income from “income in respect of a decedent” (or “IRD”). These are payments attributable to income earned by a decedent before death but received by an estate, trust, or other beneficiary after death, and taxed to that...

This paper studies the role of pensions and income taxes in determining homeownership and household wealth. It provides a cross-country analysis, using tax and pension policy designs in Germany, the US and Australia. These developed nations have similar incomes per capita but very different...

Analysis of the relationship between taxes and self-employment should account for the interplay between responses in self-employment and wage employment. To this end, we estimate a two-state multi-spell duration model which accounts for both observed and unobserved heterogeneity using a large...

Several recent studies show that the elasticity of taxable income (ETI) is not a sufficient statistic for the welfare costs of taxation due to factors such as taxbase shifting. This paper provides an additional argument demonstrating the non-sufficiency of the ETI, namely tax deductions....

The elasticity of taxable income (ETI) is often interpreted as a sufficient statistic to assess the welfare costs of taxation. Building on the conceptual framework of Chetty (2009), we show that this assertion does no longer hold for tax systems with deduction possibilities if (i) deductions...

The elasticity of taxable income (ETI) is often interpreted as a sufficient statistic to assess the welfare costs of taxation. Building on the conceptual framework of Chetty (2009), we show that this assertion does no longer hold for tax systems with deduction possibilities if (i) deductions...