Tax Progressivity and Income Inequality

Tax Progressivity and Income Inequality PDF Author: Joel Slemrod
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521587761
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
This book assembles nine papers on tax progressivity and its relationship to income inequality, written by leading public finance economists. The papers document the changes during the 1980s in progressivity at the federal, state, and local level in the US. One chapter investigates the extent to which the declining progressivity contributed to the well-documented increase in income inequality over the past two decades, while others investigate the economic impact and cost of progressive tax systems. Special attention is given to the behavioral response to taxation of high-income individuals, portfolio behavior, and the taxation of capital gains. The concluding set of essays addresses the contentious issue of what constitutes a 'fair' tax system, contrasting public attitudes towards alternative tax systems to economists' notions of fairness. Each essay is followed by remarks of a commentator plus a summary of the discussion among contributors.

Making Work Pay

Making Work Pay PDF Author: Bruce D. Meyer
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
ISBN: 1610443942
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 413

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Book Description
Since its inception under President Ford in 1975, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) has become the largest antipoverty program for the non-elderly in the United States. In 1998, more than nineteen million families received EITC payments, and the program lifted over four million Americans above the poverty line. Despite the rapid growth of the EITC throughout the 1990s, little has been written about how the program works or how it affects low-income families. Making Work Pay provides the first full-scale examination of the EITC, exploring its effects on income distribution, poverty, work, and marriage. Making Work Pay opens with a history of the EITC—its emergence in the 1970s as a pro-work, low-cost antipoverty program and its expansion through the 1980s and 1990s. The central chapters in the volume look at the substantial impact of the EITC on work incentives in recent years and show that the program, in combination with welfare reform and a strong economy, has led to an unprecedented increase in the employment of single mothers. In one study, researchers conclude that the EITC—with its stipulation that one family member be a wage earner—was the most important change in work incentives for single mothers between 1984 and 1996, a period when the employment rate of single mothers rose sharply. Several chapters outline proposals for reforming the program, addressing the concerns by policymakers about the work disincentives that rise as benefits fall with increasing income. Finally, Making Work Pay examines how EITC recipients view the credit and what they do with it once they get it. The contributors find that not only does EITC's lump-sum payment increase consumption but it also allows recipients to make changes in economic status. Many families use the end-of-the-year payment as a form of forced savings, enabling them to save for home improvement, a new car, or other purchases to improve their lives, and providing the extra economic cushion needed to move beyond mere day-to-day survival. Comprehensive in scope, Making Work Pay is an indispensable resource for policymakers, administrators, and researchers seeking to understand the ramifications of the country's largest programs for aiding the working poor.

Welfare Reform

Welfare Reform PDF Author: Jeff GROGGER
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674037960
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
In Welfare Reform, Jeffrey Grogger and Lynn Karoly assemble evidence from numerous studies to assess how welfare reform has affected behavior. To broaden our understanding of this wide-ranging policy reform, the authors evaluate the evidence in relation to an economic model of behavior.

Advance Earned Income Tax Credit

Advance Earned Income Tax Credit PDF Author: United States. Internal Revenue Service
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Earned income tax credit
Languages : en
Pages : 2

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Book Description


Handbook of Labor Economics

Handbook of Labor Economics PDF Author: Orley Ashenfelter
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 9780444501899
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 800

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Book Description
A guide to the continually evolving field of labour economics.

Handbook of Public Economics

Handbook of Public Economics PDF Author: Martin Feldstein
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 0080544193
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 744

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Book Description
The Field of Public Economics has been changing rapidly in recent years, and the sixteen chapters contained in this Handbook survey many of the new developments. As a field, Public Economics is defined by its objectives rather than its techniques and much of what is new is the application of modern methods of economic theory and econometrics to problems that have been addressed by economists for over two hundred years. More generally, the discussion of public finance issues also involves elements of political science, finance and philosophy. These connections are evidence in several of the chapters that follow. Public Economics is the positive and normative study of government's effect on the economy. We attempt to explain why government behaves as it does, how its behavior influences the behavior of private firms and households, and what the welfare effects of such changes in behavior are. Following Musgrave (1959) one may imagine three purposes for government intervention in the economy: allocation, when market failure causes the private outcome to be Pareto inefficient, distribution, when the private market outcome leaves some individuals with unacceptably low shares in the fruits of the economy, and stabilization, when the private market outcome leaves some of the economy's resources underutilized. The recent trend in economic research has tended to emphasize the character of stabilization problems as problems of allocation in the labor market. The effects that government intervention can have on the allocation and distribution of an economy's resources are described in terms of efficiency and incidence effects. These are the primary measures used to evaluate the welfare effects of government policy.

Taxes and Marriage

Taxes and Marriage PDF Author: Hector Chade
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This article analyzes the effects of differential tax treatment of married and single individuals in the United States on marriage formation and composition, divorce, and labor supply. We develop a marriage-market model with search frictions and heterogeneous agents that is sufficiently rich to capture key elements of the problem under consideration. We then calibrate the model and use it to evaluate the quantitative effects of several tax reforms aimed at making the tax law neutral with respect to marital status. We find that these reforms (i) systematically increase the labor supply of married females, with changes ranging from 0.3 to 10.1 percent; (ii) have substantial effects on the correlation of spouses' incomes, which changes from 0.2 to values between 0.185 and 0.334; (iii) can lead to either an increase or decrease in the fraction of people married, with changes that range from 0.6 to 2.4 percent.

Flat Tax Reform

Flat Tax Reform PDF Author: Gustavo Ventura
Publisher: London : Department of Economics, University of Western Ontario
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 56

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Book Description


Tax Policy and Labor Market Performance

Tax Policy and Labor Market Performance PDF Author: Jonas Agell
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262012294
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
Other chapters examine the effects of tax reforms, including the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the wage-increasing effects of progressive income taxes in a highly unionized labor market. Finally, the contributors analyze the effects of employment protection and tax penalties on the growth of the underground economy. The insights offered in these studies will be valuable to the policy analyst as well as to the academic theorist

Labor Supply and Taxation

Labor Supply and Taxation PDF Author: Richard Blundell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198749805
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 485

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Book Description
Presents Richard Blundell's outstanding research on the modern economic analysis of labour markets and public policy reforms and brings together, in revised and integrated form, a number of the author's key papers.