Income Taxation Across Countries

Xincheng Qiu and Nicolo Russo

No 26090, RFBerlin Discussion Paper Series from ROCKWOOL Foundation Berlin (RFBerlin)

Abstract: This paper examines income tax systems in over thirty countries over the past forty years using microdata from the Luxembourg Income Study. We show that income tax systems worldwide are well approximated by a two-parameter log-linear effective tax function. We provide country- and year-specific estimates and document several insights. First, higher average tax rates are associated with higher progressivity. Second, richer countries have more progressive tax systems. Third, progressivity varies by family structure, with marriage and children associated with higher progressivity. Finally, transfers play an important role in redistribution, making the overall tax-and-transfer function more progressive than the tax function.

Keywords: Taxation; Income tax progressivity; Family structure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E62 H20 H30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-03
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.rfberlin.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/26090.pdf (application/pdf)

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:crm:wpaper:26090

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in RFBerlin Discussion Paper Series from ROCKWOOL Foundation Berlin (RFBerlin) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Moritz Lubczyk () and Matthew Nibloe ().