This Article examines the tax law’s subsidies for inequality and segregation in primary and secondary education, analyzing the federal charitable deduction and education savings plans, and state tax credits for education. It argues that the tax system diverts funds from traditional public...

We characterize a measure of social welfare for linear production economies in which individuals differ in productive skills and preferences. The key feature of our measure is that it aggregates fairness gaps, defined as the difference between the money-metric utility that the individual...

In Deutschland ist der Anteil der Armen in den vergangenen zehn Jahren deutlich gewachsen. Gleichzeitig sind die privaten Vermögen im Vergleich zu anderen EU- und OECD-Ländern besonders ungleich verteilt. Zudem muss der Staat Milliardenkredite, die zur Krisenbewältigung aufgenommen wurden,...

Across the globe, the subject of immigration is politicized and polarizing. In the United States, the unauthorized immigrant population, I assert, is the result of immigration policies ill-suited to address economic and humanitarian realities. Specifically, undocumented immigrant workers yield...

The viability of our international tax system hinges on two things: (1) safeguarding the effective flow of international activities and (2) ensuring that countries can adequately collect tax on the income derived from those activities. Each of these fundamentals relies on a defensible/fair...

In Deutschland ist der Anteil der Armen in den vergangenen zehn Jahren deutlich gewachsen. Gleichzeitig sind die privaten Vermögen im Vergleich zu anderen EU- und OECD-Ländern besonders ungleich verteilt. Zudem muss der Staat Milliardenkredite, die zur Krisenbewältigung aufgenommen wurden,...

We characterize a measure of social welfare for linear production economies in which individuals differ in productive skills and preferences. The key feature of our measure is that it aggregates fairness gaps, defined as the difference between the money-metric utility that the individual...

Many countries are currently debating whether to reduce or eliminate taxes on feminine hygiene products as a measure to address "period poverty" and promote gender equality. Legislators often reject proposals involving reforms of "tampon taxes" as the pass-through of sales taxes into consumer...

One way to reduce inequality and poverty is to promote tax justice. In 2021, the government of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, implemented a program (the Devolve-ICMS Program) that refunds consumption tax to low-income citizens (cashback). This study aims to evaluate the impacts of this...

Many countries are currently debating whether to reduce or eliminate taxes on feminine hygiene products as a measure to address “period poverty” and promote gender equality. Legislators often reject proposals involving reforms of “tampon taxes” as the pass-through of sales taxes into...

In their article (NTJ 2021, 32-46), Scherer/Schmiel (1) postulate the introduction of a taxation of corporate groups on the basis of ethical responsibility according to a political-cultural market theory. The background to this is that corporate groups might apply tax avoidance or pay too little...

Tax justice debates are often framed in binary opposition between those who support lower taxes, a smaller state and greater self-sufficiency and those who support higher taxes and higher social spending. Whilst there is an element of truth to this caricature, the present volume reveals a much...

This paper provides an overview of the relation between tax policy and gender equality, covering labor, capital and wealth, as well as consumption taxes. It considers implicit and explicit gender biases and corrective taxation. On labor taxes, we discuss the well-established findings on female...

In this paper we propose a new IV estimator to be used in detecting vertical property tax inequity. We conduct Monte Carlo experiments to evaluate the bias of this estimator in comparison to traditional linear and log-linear regression based estimators. We find that the new estimator is more...

Tax evasion remains a complex issue for tax authorities, policymakers, and researchers. While socio-psychological factors have been researched, their impact on tax evasion among SMEs has not yet been determined. This paper empirically analyses the effects of tax fairness, peer influence and...

This paper studies the optimal taxation of bequests in a model in which agents have heterogeneous preferences over their consumption and the net-of-tax bequest received by their heir. The bequest left by an individual depends on both her degree of altruism and the bequest received from her...

Our trillion-dollar market capitalization behemoths, Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft, pay effective tax rates of between 0.65 percent and 2.9 percent because they deduct immediately ("expense") their intangible investments that have value beyond the end of the year. Current regulations allow...

Cigarette smoking is concentrated among low income groups. Consequently, cigarette taxes are considered regressive. However, if poorer individuals are much more price sensitive than richer individuals, then tax increases would reduce smoking much more among the poor and their cigarette tax...

The National tax laws and international tax policies have, despite impressive growth performances in many economies, worked against economic gender equality. The broad concept of tax fairness has become equivalent to what is good for economic growth and detached from social justice, leading to...

Horizontal equity -- the command that equals be treated equally -- has received increased attention, particularly in attempts to measure the desirability of tax reform proposals. This paper questions whether the normative foundations for horizontal equity justify the indexes and approaches that...

This Book Review is divided into three Parts. Part I summarizes the main findings of Does Atlas Shrug?, emphasizing their contribution to the debate on taxing the rich. In general, those finding are inconclusive in regard to whether taxing the rich exacts an unacceptable economic price. Parts II...

Tax justice advocates have spent the past decade building public consciousness about the tax planning practices of financial elites and large multinational corporations. They approached the project from a series of angles, from grassroots name-and-shame campaigns to documentary filmmaking to...

Sub-national governments often finance substantial parts of their budgets via taxes on capital or other mobile factors – despite having access to alternative, less distortionary, revenue sources. This paper develops three hypotheses to explain this pattern and tests them in a natural...

Taxes and cash transfers reduce income inequality more in France than elsewhere in the OECD, because of the large size of the flows involved. But the system is complex overall. Its effectiveness could be enhanced in many ways, for example so as to achieve the same amount of redistribution at...

It is standardly assumed that individuals adjust to perceived unfairness or norm violations in precisely the same area or relationship where the original offense has occurred. However, grievances over being exposed to injustice may have even broader consequences and also spill over to other...

The tax structure is important for the income distribution and therefore a key playground for redistributive politics. The standard theory assumes that more unequal income distribution will create a majority for more redistribution (Meltzer and Richard). This study investigates the empirical...

The EC’s recent actions regarding US multinational corporations raises important questions about the structure of global tax governance systems intended to protect markets where globalization implies the erosion of national boundaries. With the globalization of tax transactions and increasing...

Public school finance equalization programs can be characterized by the change they impose on the tax price of an additional dollar of local school spending. I calculate the tax price of spending for each school district in the United States for 1972, 1982, and 1992. I find that using the actual...

Anti-utilitarian norms often are used in assessing tax systems. Two motivations support this practice. First, many believe utilitarianism to be insufficiently egalitarian. Second, utilitarianism does not give independent weight to other equitable principles, notably concerns that reforms may...

Alan Auerbach and Kevin Hassett offer a new measure of horizontal equity (HE) that is designed to overcome deficiencies in prior indexes. There is, however, a fundamental problem that their effort shares with their predecessors' attempts: the underlying rationale for pursuing HE at the expense...

Much criticism of the income tax involves administration: the enormous complexity of the system is responsible for large compliance costs, public and private, and the tax gap is large despite substantial resources devoted to enforcement. The desire for simplification and improved compliance...

We show that under suitable assumption on the number of states and the distribution of the population numbers of the states, bias of various methods of apportionment can be quantified. We also discuss the frequency of quota violations and occurrences of the Alabama Paradox. The results provide...

This article deals with the different concepts of non-discrimination on the basis of nationality in the OECD Model and indirect or covert discrimination in the European Treaties, as interpreted by the European Court of Justice. It discusses the different tax results of both concepts for the...

Einleitung -- Die Ausgangssituation -- Future – made by history -- Der Gleichheitssatz als „Magna Charta“ des Steuerrechts -- Steuergerechtigkeit und Verfassungsrecht -- Reformvorschläge und -perspektiven -- Steuergerechtigkeit und Staatenwettbewerb -- Fazit: Steuergerechtigkeit jetzt!.