This paper examines the appropriate tax treatment of the family in a series of analytical models and numerical examples. For a population of taxpaying couples which differ in earning capacity, we derive the optimal tax rates for each potential earner. These rates depend crucially upon own and...

The purpose of the present note is to explore the structure of optimal income taxation/redistribution in an economy where the welfare of individuals depends in part on relative after-tax consumption, i.e., we specify individual welfare as a function of absolute and relative after-tax...

This paper examines the appropriate tax treatment of the family in a series of analytical models and numerical examples. For a population of taxpaying couples which differ in earning capacity, we derive the optimal tax rates for each potential earner. These rates depend crucially upon own and...

Alternative measures of saving are developed and compared to the traditional NIPA estimates. Various data sources and estimation methodologies all conclude that adjustments for net saving in durables, government capital, capital gains and losses, and revaluations are substantial. For example,...

The purpose of this paper is to provide a progress report on the issue of the implications of optimal tax theory and recent econometric evidence for tax policy. Toward this end, Section 2 provides a brief and often heuristic summary of the major results of optimal tax theory. Section 3 reports...

After exploring both the crucial role of the interest elasticity of the saving rate in the analysis of a wide variety of issues in economic - particularly tax - policy and reasons why previous studies of the effect of interest rates on consumption and saving have biased the estimated elasticity...

Section 1 presents a preliminary attempt at clarifying the ways in which taxes affect human capital accumulation. Section 2 outlines a simple general equilibrium model with two capital goods - physical and human â€" and the saving corresponding to each, to begin to deal with these issues....

Between-family differences in expenditures and output reflect the effect of simultaneous increases in children's ability on the willingness of parents to transfer resources to them. Within-family differences also reflect the attitudes of parents toward disparity among children. In this paper we...

A new empirical analysis of aggregate United States consumption and saving for the period 1947-80 is presented. The model is based on the theory of exact aggregation. It recognizes explicitly that households with different characteristics may be heterogeneous in their behavior and that aggregate...