We use micro data from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service to document how Federal Income tax liabilities vary with income, marital status and the number of dependents. We report facts on the distributions of average taxes, properties of the joint distributions of taxes paid and income, and...

We use micro data from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service to document how Federal Income tax liabilities vary with income, marital status and the number of dependents. We report facts on the distributions of average taxes, properties of the joint distributions of taxes paid and income, and...

The statutory progressivity of the income taxes paid by wage earners, net of the standard cash benefits they receive, depend on the design and interaction of personal income taxes, social security contributions (SSCs) and cash benefits. In order to capture their combined impact, this paper...

A worker can contribute pre-tax dollars to a private pension plan. Under a progressive tax, this feature reduces income taxes. Ippolito (1986} argues that an individual in 1979 can reduce lifetime taxes by 20%. We re-examine his analysis using the complete time-series of US income tax history...

In this study, we examine the behavior of self-employed taxpayers who "bunch" at an income level just below a critical threshold, which triggers a transition from a simple tax regime to a more complex one. Under the simple regime, individuals complete their tax forms independently, while the...

This study provides insights on the attributes of a tax that are measured by two different classes of progressivity indices – those defined by Kakwani (1977), Suits (1977), Stroup (2005), and Mathews (2016) and those defined by Musgrave & Thin (1948) and Reynolds & Smolensky (1977). Index...

This paper offers an overview of the thinking on personal income taxation in the Netherlands over the last two centuries. The starting point is the short-lived 1795 income tax, and the subject finds its logical finale in the Income Tax Act 2001. In between lies first a century of mainly...

When comparing tax benefit systems across Europe, Germany is usually regarded as a country with a high level of taxes and contributions which is often seen as a main challenge for the economic performance of the welfare state in terms of growth and unemployment. Especially the progressive...

In this article Professors McMahon and Abreu examine data on changes in the distribution of income and show that those changes increasingly reflect a winner-take-all pattern in which economic rewards are increasingly skewed toward those at the top 1% of the income distribution. These changes in...

A substantial majority of all capital is human capital, and most revenue from the income tax is from returns on human capital, wage income. Nevertheless, work analyzing the comprehensive, accrual ("ideal") income taxation of capital has focused on physical and financial capital. Applying the...