A large literature evaluating the welfare effects of taxation has examined the role of the labor supply elasticity, and has shown that the estimated welfare effects are highly sensitive to its size. A common feature of this literature is its exclusive focus on hours worked and the associated...

This paper presents a simple agency model to explain why third-party income reporting by employers dramatically improves income tax enforcement. Modern firms have a large number of employees and carry out complex production tasks, which requires the use of accurate business records. Because such...

This paper estimates the welfare and distributional impact of two types of welfare reform in the 15 (pre-enlargement) member countries of the European Union. The reforms are revenue neutral and financed by an overall and uniform increase in marginal tax rates on earnings. The first reform...

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...

This paper analyzes the optimal income tax treatment of couples. Each couple is modelled as a single rational economic agent supplying labor along two dimensions: primary and secondary earnings. We consider fully general joint income tax systems. Separate taxation is never optimal if social...

A central finding of the modern labor market literature is that labor supply responses tend to be concentrated along the extensive margin (labor force participation) rather than the intensive margin (hours of work). Yet, the literature on the marginal cost of public funds (MCF) focuses solely on...

This paper explores the optimal income tax treatment of couples. Each couple is modelled as a single agent supplying labor along two dimensions: primary-earner and secondary-earner labor supply. We consider fully general nonlinear income tax schedules which creates a multi-dimensional screening...

This paper analyzes the optimal income tax treatment of couples. Each couple is modelled as a single rational economic agent supplying labor along two dimensions: primary and secondary earnings. We consider fully general joint income tax systems. Separate taxation is never optimal if social...

Fertility has been declining on all continents for the last couple of decades and this development is expected to continue in the future. Prevailing innovation-based growth theories imply, as a consequence of scale effects from the size of population, that such demographic changes will lead to a...

This paper evaluates the tax treatment of married couples in OECD countries. While the existing literature has emphasized the relation between marginal taxes and hours of work, the novelty of our analysis is the incorporation of labor force participation responses. Indeed, the modern empirical...