Politically Feasible Reforms of Non-Linear Tax Systems

Felix Bierbrauer, Pierre Boyer and Andreas Peichl

No 6573, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: We study reforms of non-linear income tax systems from a political economy perspective. We present a median voter theorem for monotonic tax reforms, reforms so that the change in the tax burden is a monotonic function of income. We also provide an empirical analysis of tax reforms, with a focus on the US. We show that past reforms have, by and large, been monotonic. We also show that support by the median voter was aligned with majority support in the population. Finally, we develop sufficient statistics that enable to test whether a given tax system admits a politically feasible reform.

Keywords: non-linear income taxation; tax reforms; political economy; optimal taxation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D72 D82 H21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-acc, nep-mic, nep-pbe and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp6573_0.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Politically Feasible Reforms of Nonlinear Tax Systems (2021)
Working Paper: Politically Feasible Reforms of Non-Linear Tax Systems (2020)
Working Paper: Politically feasible reforms of non-linear tax systems (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_6573

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().