EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Does labour income react more to income tax or means‐tested benefits reforms?

Michaël Sicsic

Fiscal Studies, 2022, vol. 43, issue 3, 291-319

Abstract: I provide estimates of compensated elasticities of labour income with respect to the marginal net‐of‐tax rate on the 2006–15 period for France, exploiting not only income tax reforms but also means‐tested benefits reforms. I use semi‐parametric graphical evidence and a classic two‐stage least‐squares estimation applied to a rich data set including both financial and socio‐demographic variables. I obtain an estimated compensated elasticity on the intensive margin around 0.2–0.3 in response to income tax reforms, and around 0.1 in response to in‐work benefit reforms, while I found no statistically significant response to family allowance reforms. I show that the difference between elasticities contradicts the theoretical prediction of the classical labour supply model. These asymmetric responses are very robust to a large number of robustness checks. The most plausible explanation is that income tax reforms are more salient and better perceived than benefit reforms. I also highlight an average compensated elasticity of 0.1 for all transfers on the intensive margin and provide heterogeneous elasticities depending on types of people, which could be used for optimal tax analyses.

Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-5890.12306

Related works:
Working Paper: Does labour income react more to income tax or means-tested benefits reforms? (2022)
Working Paper: Does Labor Income React more to Income Tax or Means-Tested Benefit Reforms? (2021) Downloads
Working Paper: Does Labor Income React more to Income Tax or Means-Tested Benefit Reforms? (2020) Downloads
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:fistud:v:43:y:2022:i:3:p:291-319

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Fiscal Studies from John Wiley & Sons
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-31
Handle: RePEc:wly:fistud:v:43:y:2022:i:3:p:291-319