Sweden reached the 2007 OECD average level of female labor force participation already in 1974. Before, but not after, 1971 the average tax rate facing the housewife was a function of the income of her husband. By exploiting a rich register based data source I utilize the exogenous variation...

In this paper, I estimate the effect of the tax preference for employer-provided health insurance on the probability that an employee will be eligible for health insurance at work. I instrument for marginal tax rates with state-level state income tax rates and I control for unobservable state...

Current tax law prevents workers from trading pre-tax employer-sponsored insurance (ESI) premiums for greater after-tax take-home income. Many workers thus may pay for health plans that are more expensive or have different features from plans they would directly choose for themselves. The tax...

Health care costs in the United States have increased significantly over the past few decades. As a result, the current trends of federal health care spending are unsustainable. Section 106 of the I.R.C. contributes to the nation's increasingly large federal health care bill because it excludes...

Congress and the Administration are considering the possibility of taxing excessive employer sponsored insurance (ESI) benefits. This paper considers issues associated with the proposed tax on generous ESI plans. The primary purpose of a tax on ESI benefits is to restrain the growth of health...

This paper provides an efficiency argument in favour of progressive labour income taxation. When the consumer faces a trade-off between investments in financial and human capital, a proportional comprehensive income tax tends to discriminate in favour of human capital investments. This effect is...

In 2007 and 2008 Polish governments introduced a series of reforms which led to a substantial reduction in the tax "wedge" (in Polish: "klin") on labour. The mean ATR on total labour cost was reduced from 41.6% to 34.0%. We show that when considered together the package of introduced reforms...

Given that young children are under the control of their parents, if the government has an interest in either the welfare or the productivity of the former, it has no option but to act through the latter. Parents are, in the ordinary sense of the word, the government’s agents. They are agents...