In recent years there has been increased debate about the potential for shifting the incidence of the tax system away from a variety of economic ‘goods’ (i.e. employment, investment, etc ...) and towards environmental ‘bads’ (i.e. pollution emissions, resource extraction, etc ...). However, in spite of their apparent efficiency, economic instruments have been adopted relatively less frequently ...

Macroeconomic studies of tax policy in dynamic general equilibrium usually assume that reforms hit the economy unexpectedly and last forever. Here, we explore how previous results change when we allow policy changes to be pre-announced and of finite duration and when these facts are anticipated by households and firms. Quantitatively we demonstrate a headstart advantage from pre-announcement th...

I examine the response of husbands' and wives' earnings to a tax reform in which husbands' and wives' tax rates changed independently, allowing me to examine the effect of both spouses' incentives on each spouse's behavior. I analyze the large Swedish tax reform of 1990–1991 and find that in response to a compensated fall in one spouse's tax rate, each spouse's earnings rise. I compare these re...

This paper proposes a methodology for testing for whether tax reforms are pro-poor. This is done by extending stochastic dominance techniques to identify tax reforms that will be deemed absolutely or relatively pro-poor by a wide spectrum of poverty analysts. The statistical properties of the various estimators are also derived in order to make the method implementable using survey data. The me...

Health care system reform covers a disparate and controversial array of issues, a characteristic apparent in the related literature. The literature on proposed system reforms appears to be strongly driven by the actual public policy environment in Washington. Many articles discussing tax credits and reform proposals constructed using tax credits were published during the time when the Bush Admi...

UNLABELLED HEALTH CARE TAX CAP: With health reform a major priority of the new 111th Congress and President Barack Obama, this Issue Briefexamines the administrative and implementation issues that arise from one of the major reform proposals: Capping the exclusion of employment-based health coverage from workers' taxable income. CURRENT TAX TREATMENT The amount that employers contribute towar...

HOW BIG A ROLE THE GOVERNMENT SHOULD play in the economy is always a central issue in political debates. But measuring the size of government is not simple. People often use shorthand measures, such as the ratio of spending to gross domestic product (GDP) or of tax revenues to GDP. But those measures leave out important aspects of government action. For example, they do not capture the ways gov...

In a two-period model with uncertainty about life expectancy, we analyze several measures which are typically included in a social security reform: tax incentives for private life annuities, a cut in the social security benefits and an increase in the social security tax. First, we look at the demand side and study the effects on old-age provision for a given annuity price. It is shown that tax...