A common criticism of tax and welfare policy is that these policies create disincentives for marriage, spurring recent calls for “welfare reform” or eliminating the “marriage penalty” in the federal income tax system. These criticisms are lobbied in the midst of a literature with little conclusive evidence on the effect of these policies on marriage. Changes since the mid-1980s in federal incom...

One of the management measures to reduce tax liabilities is non-payment of taxes through tax fraud. Because personality factors may play a role in explaining tax ethics, examining personality traits and aspects of tax fraud can help to better understand the factors that influence tax decisions. The main purpose of this study is to provide a model for detecting tax fraud based on the personality...

BACKGROUND National estimates on per capita alcohol consumption are provided regularly by various sources and may have validity problems, so corrections are needed for monitoring and assessment purposes. Our objectives were to compare different alcohol availability estimates for Spain, to build the best estimate (actual consumption), characterize its time trend during 2001-2011, and quantify th...

Thermotactic behavior in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans exhibits long-term plasticity. On a spatial thermal gradient, C. elegans tracks isotherms near a remembered set-point (T(S)) corresponding to its previous cultivation temperature. When navigating at temperatures above its set-point (T>T(S)), C. elegans crawls down spatial thermal gradients towards the T(S) in what is called cryophilic...

We use a firm-CEO assignment framework to model the market for CEO effective labor. In the model’s equilibrium more talented CEOs match with and supply more effort to larger firms. Taxation of CEO incomes affects the equilibrium pricing of CEO effective labor and, hence, spills over and affects firm profits. Absent the ability to tax profits or a direct concern for firm owners, a standard presc...

This paper examines optimal income tax progressivity when avoidance responses to taxation are important, and can be controlled at some cost by the government. A simple example shows that ignoring the fact that avoidance can be controlled that the leak in Okun’s bucket can be fixed can lead to misleading implications about the optimal degree of tax rate progressivity. The paper then generalizes ...