A Brief Introduction to the Federal Income Tax

Contractual Compliance and the Federal Income Tax System

Should the Federal Income Tax Be Replaced with a National Sales or Value-added Tax?

[Editor's Note: It appears that the question of changing the federal tax base will be part of the public debate for the foreseeable future. In a Brief that we published in April, Alan Auerbach of UC Berkeley summarized the effects and uncertainties of replacing the federal income tax with a federal flat tax. In the following discussion, Steven Sheffrin of UC Davis reviews several important issu...

Effective Federal Individual Income Tax Functions: an Exploratory Empirical Analysis

We define and statistically estimate a nonlinear relationship between individual effective income tax rates and economic income for United States tax return data for tax years 1979-89. The relationship, which we call the effective tax function, has three parameters and was theoretically derived from the theory of equal sacrifice by Young (1988, 1990) and more generally by Berliant and Gouveia (...

Substitutability among Federal Income Tax Deductions: Implications for Optimal Tax Policy

This paper studies households making joint decisions about two tax-deductible activities: charitable giving and paying interest on home equity lines of credit (HELOC). By allowing for interactions, either substitutability or complementarity, between deductions, I provide a fuller understanding of the elasticity of taxable income (ETI) and the tax-price elasticity of charitable giving. The tax-p...

Income Tax Buyouts and Income Tax Evasion

A tax buyout is a contract between tax authorities and a tax payer which reduces the marginal income tax rate in exchange for a lump-sum payment. While previous contributions have focussed on labour supply, we consider the interaction with tax evasion and show that a buyout can increase expected tax revenues. This will be the case if (1) the audit probability is constant and the penalty for eva...