The Household, Time Use and Tax Policy

Patricia Apps () and Ray Rees

CESifo Economic Studies, 2004, vol. 50, issue 3, 479-500

Abstract: This paper is concerned with modelling household decisions and the welfare effects of tax policy. It seeks to emphasise the importance of a model that incorporates household production and can take account of the evident female labour supply heterogeneity across two-parent families. If, after having children, some proportion of households substitute domestic for market labour supply, the income and consumption variables used as the tax base in most countries may be poorly correlated with living standards. Taxes and welfare programs based on these variables may increase inequality by shifting the overall tax burden to low and middle wage families with both partners in work, away from families with much higher wages and in which only one member works to earn the same joint market income. The paper combines data on time use, income, taxes and benefits to show how they track female labour supply over the life cycle, resulting in much higher tax burdens on two-earner households. (JEL D13, D91, H31, J22)

Date: 2004
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/cesifo/50.3.479 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:oup:cesifo:v:50:y:2004:i:3:p:479-500.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

CESifo Economic Studies is currently edited by Panu Poutvaara

More articles in CESifo Economic Studies from CESifo Group Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().