Atkinson, Piketty, and Saez [2011] find a post-1979 surge in taxfiler top income shares in “English speaking countries” (surge countries) but not in “continental European countries and Japan” (no-surge countries). We find the puzzle that Comtrade import-to-GDP ratios and...

This article presents a first step toward consideration of how tax preferences may affect the progressivity of the Canadian federal personal income tax system at the top end. The authors consider 60 tax expenditures listed by the Department of Finance and use tax filer data to attribute the...

A great deal of attention has been given recently to trends in income inequality, especially to observations that the most dramatic changes have been occurring among the top 1 percent. The key source of data in Canada for these results is individuals' income tax returns. This study extends these...

A guaranteed income supplement (GIS) recipient will have at least 50 percent of any registered retirement savings plan (RRSP) income clawed back on the margin. Resulting RRSP effective rates of return during retirement can often be low or even negative relative to the alternative of cashing out...

This paper presents new homogeneous series on top shares of income from 1920 to 2000 in Canada using personal income tax return data. Top income shares display a U-shaped pattern over the century, with a precipitous drop during World War II, followed by a slower decline until 1970. Since the...