How much and how to tax high-income individuals is at the core of many recent proposals for incremental as well as fundamental tax reform. This paper critically reviews the economics literature and concludes that the right answer to these questions depends in part on value judgments about which...

This paper generalizes the standard model of how taxes affect the labor-leisure choice by allowing individuals to change both their labor supply and avoidance effort in response to tax changes. Doing so reveals that both the income and substitution effect of taxes depend on both preferences and...

The relative income gains of the affluent after the passage of the Tax Reform Act of 1986 (TRA86), which sharply lowered tax rates at high income levels, are overstated by comparing cross-sectional slices using concurrent income definitions, but they are large nevertheless. Although an index of...

This paper explores the normative theory of international taxation by recasting it in parallel with the theory of international trade. It first sets out a definition of 'free trade taxation,' first in the global context and then in the unilateral context. It then evaluates against this standard...

The response of the economy to two major -- although in important respects offsetting -- tax reforms has been much smaller than ardent supply-side revolutionaries expected, thus suggesting that a reassessment of the grounds for revolt is in order. This paper offers such a reassessment by first...

Conclusions about inequality based on cross-sectional snapshots of annual income can give a misleading picture of the inequality of a more permanent notion of income, due to the mobility of individuals across annual income classes. This paper reassesses some of the issues about taxation and...

This paper presents a simple two-country model of the role of taxation in capital flows between developed countries ("The North") and developing countries ("The South"). The Southern country is assumed to be unable to enforce a tax on its residents' foreign-source income, and the Northern...