A Danish tax reform, decided in May 2009 and taking effect from the beginning of 2010, lowered the marginal tax rate on top bracket taxable income from 63% to 56%. Because contributions to pension accounts are tax deductible, the reform provided an incentive to increase pension contributions...

A Danish tax reform, decided in May 2009 and taking effect from the beginning of 2010, lowered the marginal tax rate on top bracket taxable income from 63% to 56%. Because contributions to pension accounts are tax deductible, the reform provided an incentive to increase pension contributions...

The introduction of information reporting and pre-population of charitable tax deductions in Denmark in 2008 coincided with a doubling in the number of tax deductions claimed, and a 15 percent rise in the value of claims. We attribute this change to incomplete claiming of eliglbe charitable tax...

We show how tax kinks can be used to estimate the marginal propensity to consume (MPC). Tax kinks create discrete changes in the relationship between taxable income and disposable income, which – under a set of testable assumptions – enables causal identification of the spending response to...

Empirical evidence suggests that individuals often evaluate options relative to a reference point, especially seeking to avoid losses. In this paper, we provide the first welfare analysis under reference-dependent preferences. We decompose the welfare impact of changes in reference points and...

We conduct the first-ever study of actual searches done in a public tax disclosure system, analyzing about one million searches done in 2014 and 2015 in Norway. We characterize the social network these searches comprise, including its degree of homophily and reciprocation, and the demographics...

Who commits crime? Theoretically, risk-tolerant and impatient people are more likely to commit crime because they care less about the risks of apprehension and punishment. By linking experimental data on risk tolerance and impatience of young men to administrative crime records, we find...

Denmark is one of the richest countries in the world and achieves this in combination with low inequality, low unemployment, and high income security. This performance is often attributed to the Danish labor market model characterized by what has become known as flexicurity. This essay describes...

This paper decomposes inequality in subjective well-being into inequality due to socioeconomic background (SEB) and meritocratic inequality due to differences in individual merits such as school performance. We measure the meritocratic share of well-being, defined as the share of explained...

The existing literature suggests that the concern for economic efficiency calls for individual taxation of married couples with a higher rate on the primary earner. This paper reconsiders the choice of tax unit in the Becker model of household production, which includes previous analyses as...