Widening economic inequality is fast becoming the defining social problem of this era. Although there are a number of policy mechanisms available for addressing the problem, taxation is the first and best tool for the job. The federal income tax code is already moderately progressive and thus...

The mortgage interest deduction is often criticized for contributing to after-tax income inequality. Yet the effects of the mortgage interest deduction on income inequality are more nuanced than the conventional wisdom would suggest. We show that the mortgage interest deduction causes...

The current estate tax raises little revenue, yet is ill designed to further the social goals used to justify it. This Article takes one frequently mentioned goal — minimizing dynastic wealth transfers — and explores what insights focusing on that objective yields for the design of the...

As an antidote to increasing inequality, policymakers and academics frequently call for heavier taxes on the wealthy. To those outside the tax academy, proposals such as increasing marginal rates, implementing a wealth tax, or strengthening the estate tax likely sound like variations on the same...

Scholars have proposed a federal inheritance tax as an alternative to the current federal transfer tax, but there are serious flaws with that idea. In existing inheritance tax systems, those problems include: (1) different tax rates and exemptions based on the decedent’s relationship to the...

The upcoming one-year repeal of the federal estate tax in the U.S. creates an opportunity to reconsider the taxation of wealth transfers. This article argues that if inheritances are included in an optimal tax framework, existing evidence suggests that the ideal wealth transfer tax would be much...

Inequality is a defining issue of our time. Nevertheless, the longstanding economic orthodoxy for addressing inequality is that we should redistribute solely through tax and transfer policies because those are the most efficient means for doing so. While the orthodoxy holds in theory, it fails...

Optimal policy rules--including those regarding income taxation, commodity taxation, public goods, and externalities--are typically derived in models with homogeneous preferences. This article reconsiders many central results for the case in which preferences for commodities, public goods, and...

Optimal policy rules - including those regarding income taxation, commodity taxation, public goods, and externalities - are typically derived in models with homogeneous preferences. This article reconsiders many central results for the case in which preferences for commodities, public goods, and...

Specialized theoretical and empirical research should in principle be embedded in a unified framework that identifies the relevant interactions among different phenomena, enables an appropriate matching of policy instruments to objectives, and grounds normative analysis in individuals' utilities...