The traditional method of analyzing the distorting effects of the income tax greatly underestimates its total deadweight loss as well as the incremental deadweight loss of an increase in income tax rates. Deadweight losses are substantially greater than these conventional estimates because the...

In this study, we use a simple dynamic general equilibrium model to demonstrate that the tax deductions affect the three elasticities: that of the Laffer curve (the Laffer elasticity, hereafter), taxable income, and the tax revenue. We first decompose the Laffer elasticity, which consists of the...

Almost all theoretical work on how to calculate the marginal deadweight loss has been done for linear taxes and for variations in linear budget constraints. This is quite surprising since most income tax systems are nonlinear, generating nonlinear budget constraints. Instead of developing the...