This article focuses on the total tax burden faced by wage earners and uses wages as a surrogate for any form of income not taxed at a differential rate. It varies income for single individuals across jurisdictions and assesses the relationship between wages, alternative minimum tax, and the...

A hundred years after tax concessions for charitable contributions were introduced as part of the personal income taxes that many countries enacted during the First World War, these countries continue to debate the appropriate level and structure of tax concessions for charitable gifts. This...

I show that the value of preferential taxation of asset returns under an income tax that extends to property income is (a) strictly increasing in the taxpayer's marginal rate if the preference takes the form of a preferential rate; but that (b) it attains some maximum at a marginal rate between...

Health care costs in the United States have increased significantly over the past few decades. As a result, the current trends of federal health care spending are unsustainable. Section 106 of the I.R.C. contributes to the nation's increasingly large federal health care bill because it excludes...

Most modern economies tax both consumption and labour income. While there is an extensive normative literature on the optimal mix of the two taxes, there is little examination of what determines the actual mix in a well specified political economy context. We use a multi-dimensional spatial...

The expected utility formulation of the problem of a risk-averse agent's allocating a portfolio between a safe and a risky asset is widely taken as standing for the proposition that if α* ε (0, 1) is the optimal allocation to the risky asset in the absence of tax, α*/(1-t) is the optimal...

Modern tax administrations seek to optimize tax collections while minimizing administration costs and taxpayer compliance costs. Experience shows that voluntary compliance is best achieved through a system of self-assessment. Many tax administrations have introduced self-assessment principles in...

In recent years, the use of virtual economies has skyrocketed. These virtual economies include their own virtual currencies, the most well-known of which is the “bitcoin.” There are an estimated 11 million bitcoins in use today, valued at up to $237 per bitcoin in 2013. Because these...

Invoices document economic transactions and are thus critical to assess tax liabilities. We study a reform in the Dominican Republic that aimed to integrate invoice management into a broader, more comprehensive, risk-based compliance strategy. By rationing authorized invoices based on an extra...

The Aloha State has been on the front line of justice for decades, including tax justice. This is the story of a two-decade-plus journey of the Hawaii earned income tax credit — including how the state might better serve financially challenged residents as they navigate the global pandemic’s...