In this paper we use a panel of 189 countries to describe the salient trends that have emerged in national personal income tax systems spanning the twenty five year period from 1981 to 2005. Using complete national income tax schedules, we calculate actual average and marginal tax rates at...

Based on the earlier work of one of the authors, this paper develops a unified methodology to compare tax progression for dominance relations under different income distributions. We address it as uniform tax progression for different income distributions and present the respective approach for...

The conventional approach to comparing tax progression (using local measures, global measures or dominance relations for first moment distribution functions) often lacks applicability to the real world: local measures of tax progression have the disadvantage of ignoring the income distribution...

Unter kalter Progression versteht man steuerliche Mehrbelastungen, die entstehen, wenn der progressive Einkommensteuertarif trotz eines Anstiegs des Preisniveaus unverändert bleibt. Steigen die Einkommen nur in Höhe der Inflationsrate und wird damit lediglich die Kaufkraft konstant gehalten,...

I document a strong negative cross-country correlation between intergenerational earnings persistence and measures of tax progressivity - and level, and between intergenerational earnings persistence and public expenditure on tertiary education. To explain these correlations I then develop an...