The Carnegie effect (Holtz-Eakin, Joualfaian and Rosen, 1993) refers to the idea that inherited wealth harms recipients' work efforts, and possesses a key role in the discussion of taxation of intergenerational transfers. However, Carnegie effect estimates are few, reflecting that such effects...

Supporters of public disclosure of personal tax information point to its deterrent effect on tax evasion, but this effect has not been empirically explored. Although Norway has a long tradition of public disclosure of tax filings, it took a new direction in 2001 when anyone with access to the...

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...

Recent books by Thomas Piketty (Piketty, 2014) and Anthony Atkinson (Atkinson, 2015) have brought the annual wealth tax back on the policy agenda. Both authors suggest using the annual wealth tax to supplement the redistributional effects of the income tax, assigning it a role as a...

We use Norwegian administrative panel data on wealth and income between 1993 and 2015 to study lifecycle wealth dynamics, focusing on the wealthiest households. On average, the wealthiest start their lives substantially richer than other households in the same cohort, own mostly private equity,...

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...

Ownership of small businesses can facilitate upward mobility through the income hierarchy and help individuals maintain a place at the higher end of the income distribution hierarchy. This paper compares the positional stability of owners of small businesses with that of wage earners, arguing...

Both buyers and sellers of goods and services may bene.t from letting their economic transactions go unrecorded for tax purposes. The supplier reduces his tax burden by underreporting income, whereas the consumer gains from buying a non-taxed lower-priced product. The distributional implications...

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...