We evaluate the effect of a 2003 reform in the Spanish income tax on fertility and the employment of mothers with small children. The reform introduced a tax credit for working mothers with children under the age of three, while also increasing child deductions for all households with children. Theoretically, given the interplay of these two components, the expected effect of the reform is ambi...

In this paper, a collective discrete choice model is presented for female labour supply. Both preferences of females and the intrahousehold decision process are econometrically identifiable. The model incorporates nonparticipation and nonlinear taxation. It is applied to Belgian microdata and is used to evaluate the 2001 Tax Reform Act. We find moderate negative behavioural responses to the ref...

There is a widely held perception that fundamental tax reform would reduce the level of criminal and other “underground” economic activity. The popular argument relies on the idea that replacing the income tax with a sales tax would implicitly tax the return to criminal activity, whereas the return to crime is effectively untaxed by an income tax. This paper finds instead that the impact of tax...

In June 2003, the Koizumi administration created the "Trinity Reform Package." In this context, "trinity" means the decentralization reform process that involves three factors: local tax, local allocation tax grant and national government disbursement. There is, however, a missing link in the reform. This is local bond, which is one of major revenue source for local governments. In particular, ...

In this paper company-level panel data are used to explore the role of tax changes on corporate financial policy. A panel model for the years 1993-98 is estimated confirming the explanatory power of the tax variable. The estimation also shows that firms reduced leverage in the last three years (1996-98) as a reaction to important tax changes: the reduction in 1996 was the effect of the temporar...

In this paper we use a general equilibrium model of Vietnam, calibrated to 1995 data, to analyze tax reform options for Vietnam. We focus on aggregate welfare impacts as well as welfare of household groups ranked by income. The main focus is on indirect tax reform (VAT), but we also examine reforms in the external sector given both the revenue importance of the tariff and the role of tariffs in...

Presidents and policy analysts are periodically seized with a passion to reform the nation’s welfare system. This passion occasionally results in a serious proposal for thorough reform, such as President Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan, President Carter’s Program for Better Jobs and Income, or President Reagan’s New Federalism. The only reform proposal that has received experimental scrutiny, ho...

To finance basic pro-poor services, the Government of Ghana must mobilize more public revenue. But tax reform has been highly controversial in Ghana. An attempt to introduce VAT in 1995 failed after widespread protests. Although a second attempt to introduce VAT in 1998 succeeded, strong resistance to tax reform remains, and the total tax base remains narrow and over-dependent on petroleum taxe...

Discussions of the “ideal” form of individual income taxation have largely been based on some variant of the standard suggested by Haig (1921) and Simons (1938). This “Haig-Simons” (H-S) standard argues that an ideal income tax should be imposed on “comprehensive income”, and the H-S standard has been used to justify the frequently heard call for a “Broad-based, Low-rate” tax reform strategy. H...

This paper discusses the impacts of resource tax reform on the optimal resources extraction in China when the time of resource tax reform and the ways of taxes levy are uncertain. Based on the assumption that the process for accepting resource tax reform follows Poisson process, we first divide resource extraction into two processes by using the idea of dynamic planning. We then apply the optim...