Driven by high government deficits and an unevenly distributed tax burden, recent debates on economic policy have revolved mostly around reforms in the American tax codes. Consumption tax reforms are considered to circumvent the efficiency-equity tradeoff that other reforms might encounter. This paper studies long run consequences of changing to a consumption tax regime, as well as short run we...

How Tax Progression Affects Effort and Employment Within an efficiency wage framework, we study the effects of two revenue-neutral tax reforms that change the progressivity of the labour tax system. A revenue-neutral increase in both the wage tax and tax exemption and a revenue-neutral change in the composition of labour taxation towards the tax with the smaller tax base will lead to the same r...

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...

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...

Macroeconomic analysis of tax reform in dynamic general equilibrium usually assumes that reforms hit the economy unexpectedly and last forever. Here, we explore how previous results change when we allow tax reforms to be pre-announced and of finite duration and these facts are anticipated by households and firms. Interestingly, we find that the welfare gain of the representative consumer change...

This paper tests whether the 2003 dividend tax cut—one of the largest reforms ever to a US capital tax rate—stimulated corporate investment and increased labor earnings, using a quasi-experimental design and US corporate tax returns from years 1996–2008. I estimate that the tax cut caused zero change in corporate investment and employee compensation. Economically, the statistical precision chal...

We propose graphical methods to determine whether commodity-tax changes are “socially efficient”, in the sense of improving social welfare or decreasing poverty for large classes of social welfare and poverty indices. We also derive estimators of critical poverty lines and economic efficiency ratios which can be used to characterize socially-efficient tax reforms. The statistical properties of ...

Tunisia’s tax system has undergone significant structural reforms over the last several decades. Even so, its structure exhibits some major flaws, shortcomings that spill over to and affect the performance of the overall Tunisian economy. Further, the tax system continues to underperform in some fundamental ways, ways that also affect the rest of the economy. Finally, the structure of the Tunis...

This paper discusses methodological principles for social evaluation of tax systems and tax reforms when the concern is primarily turned to who gains and who loses. The discussion is followed by an empirical analysis based on Italian household data. Using a household microeconometric labor supply model we have simulated behavioral responses and welfare gains and losses for married couples resul...