We construct the ratio of the post-fisc transitory income variance to the pre-fisc transitory income variance of family incomes as a measure of fiscal progressivity in Canada between 1993 and 2008. This ratio can be interpreted as measuring the extent to which the fiscal system attenuates...

I provide a simple model that is solved analytically to yield tidy expressions for the Pareto efficient tax structures and the optimal two-bracket marginal tax rates. It is for the special case of equally-sized groups of two skill types and no exogenous spending requirements of the government....

The development of the welfare state in the Western economies between 1930 and 1990 coincided with a puzzling pattern in the taxation of top incomes. Effective tax rates at the top increased sharply but then gradually decreased, even as social transfers continued rising. We propose a new theory...

We extend the theoretical model of Rees and Shah (1986) to incorporate the effects of marginal tax rate progression and income transfers, as arguments in the individual's utility choice model between self-employment and paid- employment. Measures of the degree of progressivity in the tax and...

This paper provides a new explanation for "tax holidays," as well as their subsequent removal in a tax reform stage. In a two-period model, I assume that perfectly competitive foreign investors are uncertain about the host country government's propensity for public spending, and that infinitely...

We construct the ratio of the post-fisc to the pre-fisc transitory component of the variance of family incomes in Canada from 1993 and 2008. The ratio measures how much the tax and transfer system attenuates market income instability. It is shown that the ratio of variances is equivalent...