We exploit an exhaustive administrative dataset that includes the individual tax returns of all households in the top percentile of the income distribution in Germany to pin down the effective income taxation of households with very high incomes. Taking tax base erosion into account, we find that the top percentile of the income distribution pays an effective average tax rate of 30.5 percent an...

Countries around the world continue to tax corporate income at significant rates despite downward pressures from international competition. Average statutory corporate income tax rates fell from 46% in 1982 to 33% in 1999, though tax bases simultaneously broadened, as a result of which average corporate tax collections actually rose from 2.1% of GDP in 1982 to 2.4% of GDP in 1999. Two pieces of...

This paper contributes to recent work in political economy and public finance that focuses on how details of the tax code, rather than tax rates, are used to implement redistributive fiscal policies. I use tools from natural language processing to construct a high-dimensional representation of tax code changes from the text of 1.6 million statutes enacted by state legislatures since 1963. A dat...

This paper uses administrative data from the Australian Tax Office, to model the effective tax rates (ETRs) of large Australian corporates. The extent to which there is any habit persistence in ETRs is also examined. The results suggest that unobserved entity heterogeneity is important in explaining ETRs. In terms of observed heterogeneity, entity size, level of leverage, capital intensity, for...

Abstract: “Was taxation so heavy in the Russian transition that firms could not stay afloat?” is the question that this paper aims to answer. It details the fiscal structure and uses data from a number of sources to calculate statutory tax rates faced by businesses in 1995. The results show that statutory rates were manageable in the short run but unsustainable for several sectors in the long r...

491 National Tax Journal Vol. LX, No. 3 September 2007 Abstract The U.S. Social Security retired worker benefi t calculation is based on the average of the highest 35 years of each individual’s earnings; thus, payroll taxes for people with fl at or declining earnings can effectively become a pure tax near the end of their working careers. Individuals who still have zero or low–earning years bei...