Completely eliminating the sharp rise in the tax rate for middle income households in Germany by changing personal income tax rates would mean estimated annual losses in tax revenue of 35 billion euros, or 1.1 percent of GDP. Taxpayers with high incomes would also benefit from this type of...

Atkinson's book Inequality: What Can Be Done? (Harvard University Press, 2015) sets out a range of concrete proposals aimed at reducing income inequality, which cover a very broad span but include major changes to the income tax and social transfers system and the minimum wage. These are framed...

Top income under-coverage in developing countries not only leads to downward biased inequality indicators but might also affect the ex-ante evaluation of progressive tax reforms. We propose a simple adjustment to top incomes for formal employees (e.g. employees affiliated with social security)...

Many advanced economies have recently embarked on fiscal austerity. As this has come at a time of high and rising income disparities, policy-makers have fretted about the inequality effects of fiscal consolidations. We shed new light on this issue by empirically investigating the (composition)...