a r t i c l e i n f o Keywords: Income tax deductions for losses Private insurance Optimal income tax Kaplow (1992) shows that allowing income tax deductions for losses as partial insurance is undesirable in the presence of private insurance markets. This paper revisits the issue by considering a model that integrates Kaplow (1992) with Stiglitz (1982). We address the following question: Whethe...

This study surveys various views on income distribution and income inequality and presents alternative approaches to and analytical methods of measuring income inequality. In contrast to traditional income distribution analyses, the author examines the development of income distribution and income inequality for a period between 1996 and 2004, following the change in the regime, based on person...

We analyze the taxation of top personal incomes in Germany on the basis of an integrated data file of individual tax returns and a general household survey for the years 1992 – 2002 which includes all taxpayers in the top percentile of the gross income distribution. We show that the distribution of the tax burden is highly concentrated, and that German income taxation has remained effectively p...

The policyholder dividend of participating insurance is essentially different from the usual equity and bond profit. There are disputes on taxing methods in theory and practice, and different countries adopt different taxing methods. This paper designs a basic framework of the personal income tax system on participating insurance policy. This policy is based on the reality that the participatin...

I use data from the 1994 Consumer Expenditure Survey as well as other sources to measure the distributional impact of green tax reforms and consumption tax reforms using both annual income and lifetime income approaches to rank households. A modest tax reform in which environmental taxes equal to 10% of federal receipts are collected has a negligible impact on the income distribution when the f...

Mircrosimulation (MS) and Computable General Equilibrium models (CGE) have both been widely used in policy analysis. Their combination allows the utilisation of the advantages of both types. The aim of this paper is to describe the state-of-the-art in simulation analysis and to illustrate the benefits and problems of linking micro and macro models by analysing flat tax reform proposals for Germ...

Recently several developing and transitional countries changed their personal income tax from fairly progressive to ‡at in an e¤ort to improve e¢ ciency. But how do taxes a¤ect incentives when people can sometimes tax evade and pay bribes? In this paper, I address this question by focusing on the e¤ects of personal income tax progressivity on the decision to become self-employed. I develop a th...

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...

In this paper we characterize, both theoretically and quantiatively, the optimal mix of progressive income taxes and education subsidies in a model with endogeous human capital formation, borrowing constraints and income risk.

We have stressed that tax incidence must be traced to people, since corporations cannot bear the burden of a tax. Why then tax corporations at all? There are several possible justi…cations. First, there are valuable bene…ts, such as limited liability, to incorporation. The corporate tax could be seen as simply a tax on that value. However, the current corporate tax system does not re‡ect a sens...