We examine the revenue and redistributive effects of tax policy reforms in twelve European countries over the decade between the financial crisis and the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, setting them against the implications of a hypothetical system reflecting the extent of fiscal drag...

In the last two years the Hungarian people have witnessed several new measures in government’s fiscal policy. To respond to global crisis that hit Hungary hard, the Bajnai government enacted a series of economic reforms and spending cuts in 2009. The Orban government elected in 2010 launched...

All Direct and Indirect taxes accompanied by tax laws, accounting, auditing and tax returns, can be abolished if a new tax system called “TOP Tax system” is adopted and implemented by all nations. TOP Tax system will relieve 7 billion people of the world from the cobweb of ambiguous and...

There is often a gap between the prescriptions of an 'optimal' tax system and actual tax systems, some of which can be neither efficient economically nor efficient at redistributing income. With a focus on personal income taxes, this paper reviews the political economics literature on tax...

This paper studies changes in the United States as a consequence of the Economic Recovery Aa of 1981 (ERITA), the Tax Equality and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982 (TEFRA), and the Tax Reform Act of 1986 (TRA). The effects of ERITA, TEFRA, and TRA are demonstrated via measures of pre-tax and...

We present a scheme for analysing income tax perturbations, applied to a real Norwegian tax reform during 2016 - 2018. The framework decomposes the reform into a structural reform part and a tax level effect. The former consists of a distributional impact and a social effi ciency effect measured...

The primary objective of this paper is to examine how, and to what extent, changes in income tax rates and income tax deductions affect income inequality from a longitudinal perspective, by using microdata of Japanese individuals and households. The findings of this paper could shed light on the...

The share of pre-tax income flowing to the top of the UK income distribution increased continually and substantially in the three decades leading up to the financial crisis, but has changed little since 2013. Using microdata sampled from UK tax records, we describe the nature of top incomes in...

The desirability of inheritance and gift taxes depends on individuals' tax responsiveness. This paper demonstrates how strongly, and in what way, the German inheritance and gift tax influences taxpayer behavior. To that end, it combines administrative data with cross-bracket tax variation: a...

This paper utilizes the 1992 household budget survey of Bulgaria to show the poor revenue effects of the income tax structure prevailing in 1992 which did not take into account the underlying distribution of income. We also show that Bulgaria can benefit from a much simpler and lower income tax...