Bunching and Non-Bunching at Kink Points of the Swedish Tax schedule

The compensated taxable income elasticity at a given income level is proportional to the number of individuals who bunch at a convex kink point. This holds true even in the presence of optimization frictions if the jump in marginal tax rates is suciently large. In this paper we estimate bunching of taxpayers at a very large kink point of the Swedish tax schedule. During the period of study the change in the log net-of-tax rate reached a maximum value of 45.6%. Interestingly, we nd no economically signi cant bunching of wage earners at this large kink. Self-employed individuals, on the other hand,display clear bunching, but the implied elasticities are not very large. Following Chetty (2011) we calculate an upper bound on the structural elasticity for wage earners consistent with our estimate. If wage earners on average tolerate 1% of their disposable income in optimization costs, the upper bound on the taxable income elasticity is 0.39. We also evaluate the performance of the bunching estimator by performing Monte Carlo simulations.bunching; taxable income; bounds; optimization frictions

The Welfare Gains of Age Related Optimal Income Taxation

Using a calibrated overlapping generations model we quantify the welfare gains of an age dependent income tax. Agents face uncertainty regarding future abilities and can by saving transfer consumption across periods. The welfare gain of switching from an age-independent to an age-dependent nonlinear tax amounts in our benchmark model to around three percent of GDP. The gains are particularly high when there are restrictions on debt policy. The gains of using a nonlinear- as opposed to a linear tax are even larger. Surprisingly, it is of secondary importance to optimally choose the tax on interest income.labor income taxation, capital income taxation, age-dependent taxes, OLG model

Public Provision of Private Goods, Tagging and Optimal Income Taxation withHeterogeneity in Needs

Previous literature has shown that public provision of private goods can be a welfare-enhancing device in second-best settings where governments pursue redistributive goals. However, three issues have so far been neglected. First, the case for supplementing an optimal nonlinear income tax with public provision of private goods has been made in models where agents differ only in terms of market ability. Second, the magnitude of the welfare gains achievable through public provision schemes has not been assessed. Third, the similarities/differences between public provision schemes and tagging schemes have not been thoroughly analyzed. Our purpose in this paper is therefore threefold: first, to extend previous contributions by incorporating in the theoretical analysis both heterogeneity in market ability and in the need for the publicly provided good; second, to perform numerical simulations to quantify the size of the potential welfare gains achievable by introducing a public provision scheme, and to characterize the conditions under which these welfare gains are sizeable; finally, to compare the welfare gains from public provision with the welfare gains from tagging.optimal income taxation, in-kind transfers, tagging

the welfare enhancing role of parental leave mandates

A major factor that contributes to persistent gender variation in labor market outcomes is women's traditional role in the household. Child-related absences from work imply that women accumulate less job experience, are more prone to career discontinuities and, hence, suffer a motherhood penalty. We highlight how the gender-driven career/family segmentation of the labor market may create a normative justification for parental leave rules as a means to enhance efficiency in the labor market and alleviate the gender wage gap. (JEL D82, H21, J31, J83

Autonomy, Community, and Traditions of Liberty: The Contrast of British and American Privacy Law

In this paper we allude to a novel role played by the non-linear income tax system in the presence of adverse selection in the labor market due to asymmetric information between workers and firms. We show that an appropriate choice of the tax schedule enables the government to affect the wage distribution by controlling the transmission of information in the labor market. This represents an additional channel through which the government can foster the pursuit of its redistributive goals.Working paper</p

Simple Equilibria in General Contests

We show how symmetric equilibria emerge in general two-player contests in which skill and effort are combined to produce output according to a general production technology and players have skills drawn from different distributions. We also show how contests with heterogeneous production technologies, cost functions and prizes can be analyzed in a surprisingly simple manner using a transformed contest that has a symmetric equilibrium. Our paper provides intuition regarding how the contest components interact to determine the incentive to exert effort, sheds new light on classic comparative statics results, and discusses the implications for the optimal composition of teams

A general framework for studying contests

We develop a general framework to study contests, containing the well-known models of Tullock (1980) and Lazear and Rosen (1981) as special cases. The contest outcome depends on players' effort and skill, the latter being subject to symmetric uncertainty. The model is tractable, because a symmetric equilibrium exists under general assumptions regarding production technologies and skill distributions. We construct a link between our contest model and expected utility theory and exploit this link to revisit important comparative statics results of contest theory and show how these can be overturned. Finally, we apply our results to study optimal workforce composition

A general framework for studying contests

We develop a general framework to study contests, containing the well-known models of Tullock (1980) and Lazear and Rosen (1981) as special cases. The contest outcome depends on players' effort and skill, the latter being subject to symmetric uncertainty. The model is tractable, because a symmetric equilibrium exists under general assumptions regarding production technologies and skill distributions. We construct a link between our contest model and expected utility theory and exploit this link to revisit important comparative statics results of contest theory and show how these can be overturned. Finally, we apply our results to study optimal workforce composition

Ethnicity and tax filing behavior

We analyze differences in tax filing between natives and immigrants, focusing on two empirical examples. First, we study deductions for costs associated with traveling between home and work allowed in the Swedish tax code. Using the total population of commuters within Sweden's largest commuting zone, we find that newly arrived immigrants file substantially less than natives, immigrants with a longer stay behave more like natives, and immigrants with the longest stay file the most, even more than natives. Second, we analyze bunching behavior among the self-employed at a large salient kink point of the Swedish income tax schedule. We find much less bunching among immigrants, even after a long time in the host country, and the largest differences relative to natives in residential areas with a high immigrant concentration. Our findings have implications for the equity and efficiency of the tax system and the spatial patterns of residential and occupational choices for different ethnic groups