Mod 24_1. This next question is about the percent of people’s income that they should pay in taxes to the federal government. Which one of the following opinions best agrees with your view? You can just tell me the number of the opinion you choose. One: People who make more money should pay a larger percent of their income in taxes to the government than people who make less money. Two: people ...

In this paper we characterize quantitatively the optimal mix of progressive labor income and capital income taxes as well as and education subsidies in a model with endogenous human capital formation, borrowing constraints, income risk. and incomplete financial markets. Progressive labor income taxes provide social insurance against idiosyncratic income risk and redistributes after tax income a...

We study the dynamics of the distribution of overlapping generation economy with finitely lived agents and inter-generational transmission of wealth. Financial markets are incomplete, exposing agents to both labor income and capital income risk. We show that the stationary wealth distribution is a Pareto distribution in the right tail and that it is capital income risk, rather than labor income...

Once we get over the current global economic crisis, most developed nations will need to raise significant revenues to pay for their recent economic stimulus packages as well as for their ongoing social welfare systems. Achim Kemmerling’s book will provide policymakers with some important insights about which taxes to increase and what the consequences are for labor markets. Kemmerling observes...

Happy Taxpayers? Income Taxation and Well-Being This paper offers a first empirical investigation of how labor taxation (income and payroll taxes) affects individuals' well-being. For identification, we exploit exogenous variation in tax rules over time and across demographic groups using 26 years of German panel data. We find that the tax effect on subjective well-being is significant and posi...

Social scientists and philosophers have been concerned with issues surrounding the distribution of income or income inequality for over 200 years—the economist and philosopher Adam Smith discussed these issues as early as 1776. Academic writers have been writing on income inequality measurement issues for at least a century. Policy makers have also long been interested in income inequality issu...

Do income taxes levied at a state or regional level affect the after-tax distribution of income? Or do workers merely move between regions, causing pre-tax wages to adjust? Using the full income tax parameters for all US states from 1977-2002, I create a “simulated tax redistribution index”, which captures the mechanical impact of changes in tax policy on the Gini coefficient, but is exogenous ...

81 National Tax Journal Vol. LXI, No. 1 March 2008 Abstract Do income taxes levied at a state or regional level affect the after–tax distribution of income? Or do workers merely move between regions, causing pre–tax wages to adjust? Using the full income tax parameters for all U.S. states from 1977–2002, I create a “simulated tax redistribution index” that captures the mechanical impact of chan...