EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

How Tax Wedge of Low and Upper-income Households Affects Income Distribution: Findings from OECD Countries

Emin Efecan Aktaş

Prague Economic Papers, 2023, vol. 2023, issue 3, 246-272

Abstract: The tax wedge mainly quantifies the extent to which tax on labour income enervates employment and it reflects the total labour costs. It is commonly defined as the ratio between the amount of taxes paid by the worker and the related total labour costs for the employer. As such, the tax wedge affects both the labour force (unemployment) by reflecting the burden of the employer and indirectly the household disposable income. It is conferred that the alteration caused by the tax wedge on income distribution has been analysed with a small number of empirical studies. Based on the hypothesis that the tax wedge may affect income distribution from different aspects in terms of household size and income level, dynamic panel data analysis is carried out for 36 OECD member countries and the period 2000-2019. The dynamic panel analysis estimation findings for two households (single person with no children, earning 167% of the average wage, and one-earner married couple with two children, earning 100% of average wages) reveal that the tax wedge is negatively related to unfair income distribution. In addition, the aspect of the relationship is the same (negative) for the two households.

Keywords: Income distribution; tax wedge; labour; generalized method of moments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H24 J21 J82 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://pep.vse.cz/doi/10.18267/j.pep.831.html (text/html)
http://pep.vse.cz/doi/10.18267/j.pep.831.pdf (application/pdf)
free of charge

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:prg:jnlpep:v:2023:y:2023:i:3:id:831:p:246-272

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
Editorial office Prague Economic Papers, University of Economics, nám. W. Churchilla 4, 130 67 Praha 3, Czech Republic
http://pep.vse.cz

DOI: 10.18267/j.pep.831

Access Statistics for this article

Prague Economic Papers is currently edited by Klára Pavlová

More articles in Prague Economic Papers from Prague University of Economics and Business Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Stanislav Vojir ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:prg:jnlpep:v:2023:y:2023:i:3:id:831:p:246-272