The empirical literature on the elasticity of taxable income (ETI) sometimes questions whether estimated values are consistent with being on the revenueincreasing section of the Laffer curve, usually in the context of a single rate tax system or for top marginal rates. This paper develops...

This paper shows how income changes in response to changes in marginal income tax rates (MTRs) translate into tax revenue changes for the familiar multi-step income tax function used in many countries. Previous literature has focused on the relatively straightforward case of a proportional...

We study the link between tax progressivity and top income shares. Using variation from large-scale Western tax reforms in the 1980s and 1990s and the novel synthetic control method, we find large and lasting boosting impacts on top income shares from the progressivity reductions. Effects are...

We explore bunching at U.S. income tax kinks using a panel of 258 million tax returns from 1996 to 2014. We find bunching at seven kinks, with nearly all bunching occurring at kinks maximizing tax credits. In our sample period, the total number of bunchers increased at an 11 percent annualized...

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 extends the Mirrlees (1971) model of optimal non-linear income taxation with a monitoring technology that allows the government to verify labor effort at a positive, but non-infinite cost. Monitored individuals receive a penalty, which increases if individuals earn a lower income...

Numerical calculations imply that tax-loss harvesting is valuable to holders of taxable stock accounts. These calculations are based on the assumption that a capital loss on a stock portfolio can always be netted against ordinary income (up to a limit) or a capital gain on the same stock...

Does political alignment affect tax evasion rates? Theoretically, a better attitude toward the government could lower motivation for tax evasion through the reciprocity concept in tax morale, and if political alignment is correlated with attitude toward government, then political alignment is...

A recent review of empirical estimates of the elasticity of taxable income (ETI) concluded that ‘the US marginal top rate is far from the top of the Laffer curve' (Saez et al, 2012, p.42). This paper provides a detailed examination of the analysis underlying this conclusion, and considers...

This paper examines the impact of marginal tax rates, which incorporate the earned income tax credit (EITC) as it existed in 1988, on the reporting of income by low-income taxpayers. We generally find that misreported income is not affected by tax rates, except for proprietors. Negative marginal...