How do different income taxation systems affect household decisions and welfare? We answer this question by first documenting the strong labor supply disincentives for secondary earners of the U.S. tax system and by using variations from the Bush Tax Cuts to assess their effects on...

This paper studies the impact of tax incentives on economic behavior within the household. We focus on an Italian tax policy that grants a large tax credit to main earners if their spouses, designated as “dependent spouses” by the tax law, report income below a certain threshold. Combining a...

Tax policy debates—and reforms—depend heavily on estimates of how alternative tax rules would affect behavior. Yet there is considerable controversy about the key empirical links among tax rates, household decisions, and revenue collections. The nine papers in this volume exploit the...