Family Labor Supply With Taxes

Over the period 1960 - 1983 the proportion of federal tax revenue raised by taxation of labor supply has risen from 57-77 percent. In this paper, we specify and estimate a model of family labor supply which treats both federal and state taxation. Husbands and wives labor supply are treated jointly rather than in aseparate manner as in previous research. A method to calculate the virtual wage for nonworking spouses is used within a utility maximizing framework to treat correctly the joint family labor supply decision. Joint family efforts are found to be important. The efficiency cost (deadweight loss) of labor taxation is estimated to be 29.6% of tax revenue raised. The effect of the new 10% deduction to ease the marriage tax for working spouses leads to a prediction of 3.8% increase in wives labor supply and a .9% decrease in husbands labor supply.Overall taxes paid are predicted to decrease by 3.4%.

Presents Richard Blundell's outstanding research on the modern economic analysis of labour markets and public policy reforms and brings together, in revised and integrated form, a number of the author's key papers.

First published in 1981. This book reports on a decade of research into the effects of taxation on the supply of labour. In addition to their work in making labour supply estimates, the study explores a number of the ways labour supply estimates can be used. When budget constraints are non-linear it is not possible to estimate the effects of (tax) or other policy changes from knowledge of labour supply elasticities alone, and it is necessary to re-estimate the original model used to derive the estimates. The implications of labour supply estimates for the study of inequality and optimal taxation are considered. Macro-economic models of the economy typically omit labour supply functions or include functions which are inconsistent with micro-economic work on labour supply. This book will appeal to academic economists, senior students and policy-makers in the field of public finance and labour economics, who will find much of interest from both the theoretical and policy standpoints.

An empirical approach to optimal income taxation design is developed within an equilibrium collective marriage market model with imperfectly transferable utility. Taxes distort labour supply and time allocation decisions, as well as marriage market outcomes, and the within household decision process. Using data from the American Community Survey and American Time Use Survey, we structurally estimate our model and explore empirical design problems. We consider the optimal design problem when the planner is able to condition taxes on marital status, as in the U.S. tax code, but we allow the schedule for married couples to have an arbitrary form of tax jointness. Our results suggest that the optimal tax system for married couples is characterized by negative jointness, although the welfare gains from this jointness are shown to be quite modest.

Economic models in much of the public economics literature have been slow to reflect the significant changes towards double-income households throughout the developed world. This graduate-level text develops a more sophisticated approach to household economics, one that allows for multiple-income earners and shared decision-making. This approach is used to present a fundamentally new view of consumption. It then applies this to an analysis of tax systems, combining theoretical analysis of optimal taxation and tax reform with careful empirical study of the characteristics of income tax systems in four different countries: Australia, Germany, the UK and the USA. The book is particularly concerned with analysing, both theoretically and empirically, the impact of taxation on female labour supply, and identifying its effects on work incentives and fairness of income distribution. All this adds up to a fascinating new approach to the economics of household for researchers in both public and private sectors.

Over 18 million taxpayers are projected to receive the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) in tax year 1997, at a total cost to the federal government of about 25 billion dollars. The EITC is refundable, so that any amount of the credit exceeding the family's tax liability is returned in the form of a cash refund. Advocates of the credit argue that this redistribution occurs with much less distortion to labor supply than that caused by other elements of the welfare system. This popular view that the credit is unlikely to hold among married couples. Theory suggests that primary earners (typically men) would increase labor force participation, but secondary earners would reduce their labor supply in response to an EITC. We study the labor supply response of married couples to several EITC expansions between 1984 and 1996. While our primary interest is the response to changes in the budget set induced by the EITC, our estimation strategy takes account of budget set changes caused by federal tax policy, and by cross-sectional variation in wages, income, and family size. We use both quasi-experimental and reduced form labor supply models to estimate the impact of EITC induced tax changes. The results suggest that EITC expansions between 1984 and 1996 increased married men's labor force participation only slightly but reduced married women's labor force participation by over a full percentage point. Overall, the evidence suggests that family labor supply and pre-tax family earnings fell among married couples. Our results imply that the EITC is effectively subsidizing married mothers to stay at home, and therefore have implications for the design of the program.

Gender-Based Taxation (GBT) satisfies Ramsey's rule of optimality because it taxes at a lower rate the more elastic labor supply of women. This holds when different elasticities between men and women are taken as exogenous. We study GBT in a model in which labor supply elasticities emerge endogenously from the bargained allocation of goods and time in the family. We explore the cases of superior bargaining power for men, higher men wages and higher women productivity in home duties. In all cases, men commit to a career in the market and take less home duties than women. As a result, their market work becomes less substitutable to home duty and their labor supply responds less to changes in the market wage. When society can resolve its distributional concerns efficiently with gender-specific lump sum transfers, GBT with higher marginal tax rates on (single and married) men is optimal. In addition, GBT affects the intrafamily bargaining, leading to a more balanced allocation of labor market outcomes across spouses and a smaller gender gap in labor supply elasticities.