Empirical Foundations of Household Taxation
Empirical Foundations of Household Taxation

Author: Martin Feldstein

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1996-08-01

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 9780226240978

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Tax policy debates—and reforms—depend heavily on estimates of how alternative tax rules would affect behavior. Yet there is considerable controversy about the key empirical links among tax rates, household decisions, and revenue collections. The nine papers in this volume exploit the substantial variation in U.S. tax policy during the last two decades to investigate how taxes affect a range of household behavior, including labor-force participation, saving behavior, choice of health insurance plan, choice of child care arrangements, portfolio choice, and tax evasion. They also present new analytical results on the effects of different types of tax policy. All of this research relies on household-level data—drawn either from public-use tax return files or from large household-level surveys—to explore various aspects of the relationship between taxes and household behavior. As debates about the effects of proposed tax reforms continue in the 1990s, this volume will be of interest to policy makers and scholars in the field of public finance.

Public Finance and Public Policy
Public Finance and Public Policy

Author: Jonathan Gruber

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 806

ISBN-13: 9780716786559

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Chapters include: "Income distribution and welfare programs", "State and local government expenditures" and "Health economics and private health insurance".

The New Dynamic Public Finance
The New Dynamic Public Finance

Author: Narayana R. Kocherlakota

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2010-07-01

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 1400835275

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Optimal tax design attempts to resolve a well-known trade-off: namely, that high taxes are bad insofar as they discourage people from working, but good to the degree that, by redistributing wealth, they help insure people against productivity shocks. Until recently, however, economic research on this question either ignored people's uncertainty about their future productivities or imposed strong and unrealistic functional form restrictions on taxes. In response to these problems, the new dynamic public finance was developed to study the design of optimal taxes given only minimal restrictions on the set of possible tax instruments, and on the nature of shocks affecting people in the economy. In this book, Narayana Kocherlakota surveys and discusses this exciting new approach to public finance. An important book for advanced PhD courses in public finance and macroeconomics, The New Dynamic Public Finance provides a formal connection between the problem of dynamic optimal taxation and dynamic principal-agent contracting theory. This connection means that the properties of solutions to principal-agent problems can be used to determine the properties of optimal tax systems. The book shows that such optimal tax systems necessarily involve asset income taxes, which may depend in sophisticated ways on current and past labor incomes. It also addresses the implications of this new approach for qualitative properties of optimal monetary policy, optimal government debt policy, and optimal bequest taxes. In addition, the book describes computational methods for approximate calculation of optimal taxes, and discusses possible paths for future research.

Taxation and Migration
Taxation and Migration

Author: Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Publisher: Kluwer Law International B.V.

Published: 2015-08-21

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 9041161449

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Migration has become an increasingly important phenomenon for societies, especially given its highly controversial political dimension. The complexity of the migrant integration process and its many varieties present challenges to policymakers who need high-quality information on which to base decisions. Nowhere is this necessity more pressing than in the development of relevant tax rules that meet the basic requirements of efficiency and equity. Moreover, the ascent of the so-called emerging economies coupled with the stagnation of the richest economies of the world implies reform of the current competition-based international tax regime and the adoption of a more cooperative paradigm. This important and timely book, for the first time in such depth, explores such aspects of the problem as the following: - migration for tax reasons, especially corporate "inversions" (change in corporate residence for tax purposes); - tax consequences related to individuals who receive free or subsidized education in one country and profit from it in another; - taxing cross-border retirement income; and - migration-related aspects of tax preferential treatment of the elderly. With particular emphasis on the effects and opportunities created by the changing international tax regime - and with attention to the role of tax treaties and recent court cases - chapters by well known tax experts present evidence on the consequences of migration in all its facets and simulate the effects of several recently enacted and proposed changes in tax law in European countries, the United States, and other jurisdictions. The grounded propositions and recommendations offered in this deeply informed book will allow policymakers to draft tax-residence rules that minimize distortion and promote fairness. The book will also be of interest to tax law practitioners and other tax specialists, migration experts, and academics investigating one of the crucial political issues of our time.

Top Incomes
Top Incomes

Author: A. B. Atkinson

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2010-04

Total Pages: 799

ISBN-13: 0199286892

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This volume brings together an exciting range of new studies of top incomes in a wide range of countries from around the world. The studies use data from income tax records to cast light on the dramatic changes that have taken place at the top of the income distribution. The results cover 22 countries and have a long time span, going back to 1875.

Making Work Pay
Making Work Pay

Author: Bruce D. Meyer

Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation

Published: 2002-01-10

Total Pages: 413

ISBN-13: 1610443942

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Since its inception under President Ford in 1975, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) has become the largest antipoverty program for the non-elderly in the United States. In 1998, more than nineteen million families received EITC payments, and the program lifted over four million Americans above the poverty line. Despite the rapid growth of the EITC throughout the 1990s, little has been written about how the program works or how it affects low-income families. Making Work Pay provides the first full-scale examination of the EITC, exploring its effects on income distribution, poverty, work, and marriage. Making Work Pay opens with a history of the EITC—its emergence in the 1970s as a pro-work, low-cost antipoverty program and its expansion through the 1980s and 1990s. The central chapters in the volume look at the substantial impact of the EITC on work incentives in recent years and show that the program, in combination with welfare reform and a strong economy, has led to an unprecedented increase in the employment of single mothers. In one study, researchers conclude that the EITC—with its stipulation that one family member be a wage earner—was the most important change in work incentives for single mothers between 1984 and 1996, a period when the employment rate of single mothers rose sharply. Several chapters outline proposals for reforming the program, addressing the concerns by policymakers about the work disincentives that rise as benefits fall with increasing income. Finally, Making Work Pay examines how EITC recipients view the credit and what they do with it once they get it. The contributors find that not only does EITC's lump-sum payment increase consumption but it also allows recipients to make changes in economic status. Many families use the end-of-the-year payment as a form of forced savings, enabling them to save for home improvement, a new car, or other purchases to improve their lives, and providing the extra economic cushion needed to move beyond mere day-to-day survival. Comprehensive in scope, Making Work Pay is an indispensable resource for policymakers, administrators, and researchers seeking to understand the ramifications of the country's largest programs for aiding the working poor.

Tax Systems
Tax Systems

Author: Joel Slemrod

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2013-12-13

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 0262319012

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An approach to taxation that goes beyond an emphasis on tax rates to consider such aspects as administration, compliance, and remittance. Despite its theoretical elegance, the standard optimal tax model has significant limitations. In this book, Joel Slemrod and Christian Gillitzer argue that tax analysis must move beyond the emphasis on optimal tax rates and bases to consider such aspects of taxation as administration, compliance, and remittance. Slemrod and Gillitzer explore what they term a tax-systems approach, which takes tax evasion seriously; revisits the issue of remittance, or who writes the check to cover tax liability (employer or employee, retailer or consumer); incorporates administrative and compliance costs; recognizes a range of behavioral responses to tax rates; considers nonstandard instruments, including tax base breadth and enforcement effort; and acknowledges that tighter enforcement is sometimes a more socially desirable way to raise revenue than an increase in statutory tax rates. Policy makers, Slemrod and Gillitzer argue, would be well advised to recognize the interrelationship of tax rates, bases, enforcement, and administration, and acknowledge that tax policy is really tax-systems policy.