The development of the welfare state in the decades following the Great Depression coincided with a puzzling pattern in the taxation of top incomes. Effective tax rates at the top increased sharply but then gradually decreased, even as social transfers continued rising. We argue that this was...

We extend the theoretical model of Rees and Shah (1986) to incorporate the effects of marginal tax rate progression and income transfers, as arguments in the individual's utility choice model between self-employment and paid- employment. Measures of the degree of progressivity in the tax and...

I provide a simple model that is solved analytically to yield tidy expressions for the Pareto efficient tax structures and the optimal two-bracket marginal tax rates. It is for the special case of equally-sized groups of two skill types and no exogenous spending requirements of the government....

The development of the welfare state in the Western economies between 1930 and 1990 coincided with a puzzling pattern in the taxation of top incomes. Effective tax rates at the top increased sharply but then gradually decreased, even as social transfers continued rising. We propose a new theory...

We construct the ratio of the post-fisc transitory income variance to the pre-fisc transitory income variance of family incomes as a measure of fiscal progressivity in Canada between 1993 and 2008. This ratio can be interpreted as measuring the extent to which the fiscal system attenuates...