Taxation of Couples and Marital Status – Simulation of Three Reforms of the Marital Quotient in France

Imposition des couples et statut marital -Simulation de trois réformes du quotient conjugal en France

Guillaume Allègre (), Hélène Périvier () and Muriel Pucci

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: In France, married couples or couples in civil partnerships must declare their resources jointly and are allocated two tax unit. This tax system, referred to as the marital quotient, represents a financial package of around 10 billion euros. Using the Ines microsimulation model, we simulate three reforms of this system: an individualisation of taxation, a reduction of marital quotient to 1.5 tax units while allowing married couples/couples in civil partnerships to opt for individual taxation and, finally, the capping of the marital quotient at the same level as the family quotient. Individualisation results in the highest tax gain, around 7 billion euros, compared with 3.8 billion when the marital quotient is reduced to 1.5 tax units and 3 billion with the marital quotient cap. With these reforms, 46%, 45% and 7% of couples lose out, respectively. The median losses correspond to 1.5%, 1.3% and 2.6% of the disposable income of the households concerned, respectively. Finally, 60%, 64% and 83% of the losses are in the last three standard of living deciles, respectively.

Keywords: income tax; marital quotient; microsimulation; impôt sur le revenu; quotient conjugal (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-03201795
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Economie et Statistique / Economics and Statistics, inPress

Downloads: (external link)
https://shs.hal.science/halshs-03201795/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Taxation of Couples and Marital Status – Simulation of Three Reforms of the Marital Quotient in France (2021)
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:hal:journl:halshs-03201795

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().