This paper examines the optimal direction of marginal income tax reform in the context of New Zealand, which recently reduced its top marginal income tax rate to one of the lowest in the OECD. A behavioural microsimulation model is used, in which social welfare functions are defined in terms of...

In this paper we propose a framework to study changes in the redistributive consequences of income taxes and transfers. In contrast with previous approaches the new method allows decomposition of the change in the redistributive impact into four components: the immediate effect of changes in the...