This paper begins with a survey of the literature on the political economy approaches to labor income taxation. We focus on recent progress made by examining in detail the specific properties of non-linear taxes derived in the context of voting. Next, we present new results on the existence of...

We study the optimal nonlinear income tax problem with multidimensional individual characteristics on which taxes cannot be conditioned. We obtain an optimal tax formula that generalizes the standard one by averaging, with specific weights, the sufficient statistics of individuals who earn the...

This paper provides necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of Pareto-improving tax reforms. The conditions can be expressed as sufficient statistics and have a wide range of potential applications in public finance. We discuss one such application in detail: the introduction of...

We present a conceptual framework for the analysis of politically feasible tax reforms. First, we prove a median voter theorem for monotonic reforms of non-linear tax systems. This yields a characterization of reforms that are preferred by a majority of individuals over the status quo and hence...

This paper exploits the multi-tiered structure of personal income taxation in Italy to investigate within-tier (horizontal) and between-tiers (vertical and diagonal) fiscal externalities. Estimation of an unrestricted income tax reaction function on municipalities located at internal regional...