The Usual Excess-Burden Approximation Usually Doesn't Come Close

Eauty Doesn't Usually Come in Gray – nor in Pallid Skin

Excess Burden of Taxation

The excess burden of taxation is the efficiency cost, or deadweight loss, associated with taxation. Excess burden is commonly measured by the area of the associated Harberger triangle, though accurate measurement requires the use of compensated demand and supply schedules. The generation of empirical excess burden studies that followed Arnold Harberger’s pioneering work in the 1960s measured th...

Modelling the Excess Burden of Royalties

Divorce and the Excess Burden of Lawyers

Divorce and the Excess Burden of Lawyers We present a model where divorcing spouses can choose to hire lawyers in their divorce process. Spouses encounter incentives as in the classical prisoners’ dilemma: Despite the zero sum nature of the game and the lawyers’ fees, each spouse has an incentive to hire a lawyer. We propose a simple institutional setting allowing for joint lawyers in order to ...

The Generalized Excess Burden of Taxation

A generalized measure of the excess burden of a tax system is proposed which integrates the distribution of taxes, along with standard efficiency and compliance costs, as a source of excess burden. In the absence of compliance and efficiency costs, the generalized excess burden measures the excess burden of regressive taxation, and provides a useful index for ranking the regressivity of differe...