This paper analyzes the effect of the introduction of a final withholding tax on capital income on the progression of the German income tax. As previous literature shows, even with synthetic income taxation, tax progression was strongest in the middle of the income distribution, and decreased...

We study optimal income tax progressivity in an environment where individuals are exposed to idiosyncratic income and health risks over the lifecycle. Our results, based on a calibration for the US economy, indicate that the presence of health risk combined with incomplete insurance markets...

Existing tax schedules are often overly complex and characterized by discontinuities in the marginal tax burden. In this paper we propose a class of progressive smooth functions to replace personal income tax schedules. These functions depend only on three meaningful parameters, and avoid the...

Effective Marginal Tax Rates (EMTRs) reflect the interaction of the personal income tax scale, main benefits, and supplementary benefits. They show how a dollar increase in gross income translates to an increase in income in the hand (after taxation and the withdrawal of income-tested...

Using a series of Pakistani tax reforms and administrative records, I document that taxable income responses induced by to-zero tax cuts are orders of magnitude larger than ones induced by similar-sized other cuts. This finding is remarkably robust to alternative specifications and holds for...

We study the implications of procedural fairness on income taxation. All taxation schemes are allowed for, up to the constraints implied by incentive compatibility and budget balance. We formulate procedural fairness as a particular non-cooperative bargaining game and examine the stationary...

In a number of high-income countries over the past few decades there has been a large growth in income inequality and at the same time a shift in the burden of taxation from the top to the middle of the income distribution. This paper applies the theory of optimal piecewise linear taxation to...

Deaton (1979) showed that if preferences are weakly separable in goods and labour and quasihomothetic in goods and the government imposes an optimal linear progressive tax, commodity taxes are redundant. Hellwig (2009) generalized the Deaton theorem by showing that the allocation obtained under...

We study the implications of procedural fairness on income taxation. We formulate procedural fairness as a particular non-cooperative bargaining game and examine the stationary subgame perfect equilibria of the game. The equilibrium outcome is called tax equilibrium and is shown to be unique....