Optimal Income Taxation of Lone Mothers: An Empirical Comparison of the UK and Germany

Richard Blundell (), Mike Brewer, Peter Haan and Andrew Shephard

Economic Journal, 2009, vol. 119, issue 535, F101-F121

Abstract: Optimal tax rules are used to evaluate the optimality of taxation for lone mothers in Germany and Britain. The theoretical model is combined with elasticities derived from the structural estimation of lone mothers’ labour supply. For both countries we do not find that in‐work credits with marginal tax rates are optimal. However we show that when the government has a low taste for redistribution, out‐of‐work transfers and transfer for the working poor are very similar, implying very low marginal tax rates. Further, the current tax and transfer systems in both countries are shown to be optimal only if governments have a much higher welfare value for income received by the non‐workers than the working poor.

Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (68)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0297.2008.02261.x

Related works:
Journal Article: Optimal Income Taxation of Lone Mothers: An Empirical Comparison of the UK and Germany (2009)
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:wly:econjl:v:119:y:2009:i:535:p:f101-f121

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://onlinelibrary ... 1111/(ISSN)1468-0297

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Journal is currently edited by Estelle Cantillon, Martin Cripps, Andrea Galeotti, Morten Ravn, Kjell G. Salvanes, Frederic Vermeulen, Hans-Joachim Voth and Rachel Kranton

More articles in Economic Journal from Royal Economic Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().