We estimate the effect of estate taxation on bequests exploiting a sequence of Italian reforms that culminated with the reduction of estate taxes in 1999 and their abolishment in 2001. To perform our exercise, we use the 1993-2006 Survey of Household Income and Wealth, which has data on real...

A worker can contribute pre-tax dollars to a private pension plan. Under a progressive tax, this feature reduces income taxes. Ippolito (1986} argues that an individual in 1979 can reduce lifetime taxes by 20%. We re-examine his analysis using the complete time-series of US income tax history...

Intergenerational inequality and old-age poverty are salient issues in contemporary China. China's aging population threatens the fiscal sustainability of its pension system, a key vehicle for intergenerational redistribution. We analyze the positive and normative effects of alternative pension...

Private pension provision faces the challenging task of providing stable income streams during retirement. The challenge has increased markedly in the last decades due to volatile financial markets, falling interest rates and the withdrawal of employers and external insurers as risk bearers of...

In recent years, venture capital has increasingly become a factor in the financing of new firms. We examine how the value of mature firms determines the incentives of entrepreneurs to start up new firms and of venture capitalists to finance and advise them. We examine how capital gains taxes as...

This paper analyses the changes to the tax and social security systems that have occurred since Czechoslovakia's `velvet revolution' in 1989. It shows how the tax system is moving to meet the requirements of a market economy. It suggests that a particularly high priority has to be given to...

This paper considers optimal educational investment and labour supply with increasing returns to scale in the earnings function In so doing we develop the work of Rosen (1983), who first highlighted the increasing returns argument that arises because private returns to human capital investment...

We study the recent evolution of top incomes in Switzerland, analyzing both social security data on labor incomes and tax data on total income. The results show that in the last 20 years, the share of top incomes has risen, and the top 0.01 percent’s share even doubled, putting Switzerland...

What would be the aggregate effects of adopting a more generous and universal childcare subsidy program in the U.S.? We answer this question in a life-cycle equilibrium model with heterogeneous married and single households with three key features: (i) joint labor-supply of married households...

We use micro data from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service to document how Federal Income tax liabilities vary with income, marital status and the number of dependents. We report facts on the distributions of average taxes, properties of the joint distributions of taxes paid and income, and...