When consumers have questions about companies' services and products, whether medical insurance, airline tickets or home appliances, they almost always encounter automated agents and other forms of customer service technology. Increasingly, tax authorities have begun to offer online...

Tax expenditure analysis (TEA) requires a baseline for identifying tax provisions that provide subsidies or incentives instead of serving to define the tax base and to implement the tax. With respect to the federal income tax, the baseline historically has been the Schanz-Haig-Simons (SHS)...

Structured settlements have been subsidized by federal, state, and local taxes for nearly three decades. The subsidy, which comes in the form of a tax exclusion that encourages personal injury claimants to forgo a lump sum settlement in favor of long-term periodic payments, is premised upon the...

The semi-dual income tax typically combines a progressive tax schedule for labour and pension income with low and often flat and differentiated nominal tax rates on some forms of capital income. This paper discusses the rationale for the adoption of semi-dual income tax in the taxation of...

Specialized theoretical and empirical research should in principle be embedded in a unified framework that identifies the relevant interactions among different phenomena, enables an appropriate matching of policy instruments to objectives, and grounds normative analysis in individuals' utilities...

There is a rising share of individuals spending at least some part of their working life abroad and acquiring pension rights. While the portability of pensions and other social benefits has received some analytical attention over the recent decade there is currently limited analytical guidance...

Pension policy reforms across the world in recent decades are a reaction to the changing demographic and socioeconomic environment. While pension scheme redesign has received much attention, the tax treatment of contributions, returns, and benefits of retirement savings remains mostly unattended...

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...

This article explores subjects in optimal income taxation characterized by recent research interest, practical importance in light of concerns about inequality, potential for misunderstanding, and prospects for advancement. Throughout, the analysis highlights paths for further investigation....

We characterize the second-best allocation in a Mirrleesian optimal tax model where agents differ in multiple dimensions and the planner can tax multiple goods non-linearly. We develop a new method that allows us to solve the partial differential equations that describe the optimum regardless of...