Transferring public benefits to people in no need of them appears to be a waste of public money. Thus, there seems to be support for a move away from universal child benefits and towards means testing. This study presents a critique of this overly-simplistic view and proposes a very simple...

Transferring public benefits to people in no need of them appears to be a waste of public money. Thus, there seems to be support for a move away from universal child benefits and towards means testing. This study presents a critique of this overly-simplistic view and proposes a very simple...

Taking a piecemeal tax reform approach to tax analysis in the spirit of Feldstein (1976), we establish a framework for assessing perturbations of the income tax schedule. It decomposes a reform into a change in tax level and a structural reform part. Focussing on the latter, the analysis singles...

The Norwegian Tax Administration operated multi-year random audits of personal income tax returns. We exploit this exceptional randomized setup to estimate the effects of tax audits on future compliance explicitly distinguishing between dynamic responses of compliant and noncompliant audited...

The Norwegian Tax Administration operated multi-year random audits of personal income tax returns. We exploit this exceptional randomized setup to estimate the effects of tax audits on future compliance explicitly distinguishing between dynamic responses of compliant and noncompliant audited...

Models of labor supply derived from stochastic utility representations and discretized sets of feasible hours of work have gained popularity because they are more practical than the standard approaches based on marginal calculus. In this paper we argue that practicality is not the only feature...

The paper discusses the tax treatment of commuting where wages and housing cost vary across locations. An income tax distorts the locational choices of agents, who dislike commuting and have preferences for place of residence Wages, housing cost and commuting cost determine how subsidising or...

Norwegian parents of preschool children make their care choices from a completely different choice set compared to what their predecessor did, say, two decades ago. Now, there is essentially only one type of nonparental care, center-based care, and at the parental side fathers take a more...

Evidence of owners of small businesses engaging in tax motivated shifts in organizational form is scarce. The main reason is lack of micro data enabling us to track tax-payers' movements across organizational modes. By exploiting new panel data that combine information from several public...

This study argues that parents have a desire for dividing equally between their children, and that this motive applies to transfers of gifts inter vivos. We suggest that the equal division motive competes with traditional altruism: support to the child or the children with greatest needs. When...