This paper provides general and empirically implementable sufficient statistics formulas for optimal nonlinear tax systems in the presence of preference heterogeneity. We study unrestricted tax systems on income and savings (or other commodities) that implement the optimal direct-revelation...

Using administrative tax records for UK businesses, we document both bunching in annual turnover below the VAT registration threshold and persistent voluntary registration by almost half of the firms below the threshold. We develop a conceptual framework that can simultaneously explain these two...

This paper estimates the effects of tax incentives on charitable contributions in the UK, using the universe of self-assessment income tax returns between 2005 and 2013. We exploit variation from a large reform in 2010 to estimate intensive and extensive-margin tax-price elasticities of giving....

This paper estimates the intensive and extensive-margin tax-price elasticities of giving using UK administrative tax return data, exploiting variation from a large tax reform. Using a variety of estimation methods and new instruments for the tax-price of giving, we find an intensive-margin...

An influential result in modern optimal tax theory, the Atkinson and Stiglitz (1976) theorem, holds that for a broad class of utility functions, all redistribution should be carried out through labor income taxation, rather than differential taxes on commodities or capital. An important...

This paper estimates the intensive and extensive-margin tax-price elasticities of giving using UK administrative tax return data, exploiting variation from a large tax reform. Using a variety of estimation methods and new instruments for the tax-price of giving, we find an intensive-margin...

People have long debated whether state-run lotteries exploit the poor or are a win-win that generates enjoyment and government revenues. We study socially optimal lottery design in an optimal taxation framework with biased consumers and estimate sufficient statistics for optimal policy. Lottery...

Patent boxes have been heavily debated for their role in corporate tax competition. This paper uses firm-level data for the period 2000-2011 for the top 2,000 corporate research and development (R&D) investors worldwide to consider the determinants of patent registration across a large sample of...