This paper addresses questions of the following nature: under what conditions does a welfare-improving reform of a nonlinear income tax system necessitate a change in a particular agent's marginal tax rate or total tax burden? Our analysis is therefore a study in tax reform, rather than in...

An important question in the literature on charitable contributions is the extent to which tax-financed contributions by the government crowd out private contributions. This paper examines a simple model of charitable contributions in which there exist both warm-glow and public good motives for...

This paper shows that tax reform techniques are well-suited to an examination of the Laffer argument, i.e., the possibility that an increase in a tax rate may reduce tax revenues (and vice versa). Our methodology allows us to examine the Laffer argument directly, without deriving the Laffer...