Arbeitspapier

Pareto-Improving Tax Reforms and the Earned Income Tax Credit

This paper provides necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of Pareto-improving tax reforms. The conditions can be expressed as sufficient statistics and have a wide range of potential applications in public finance. We discuss one such application in detail: the introduction of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) in the US. We find that the EITC can be viewed as a response to an in-efficiency in the tax and transfer system prevailing at the time. This adds a new perspective to the literature on why the EITC is a good idea, emphasizing Pareto improvements rather than equity-efficiency trade-offs.

Language
Englisch

Bibliographic citation
Series: CESifo Working Paper ; No. 8358

Classification
Wirtschaft
Noncooperative Games
Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
Taxation and Subsidies: Efficiency; Optimal Taxation
Subject
tax reforms
non-linear income taxation
optimal taxation
earned income tax credits
pareto efficiency

Event
Geistige Schöpfung
(who)
Bierbrauer, Felix
Boyer, Pierre C.
Hansen, Emanuel
Event
Veröffentlichung
(who)
Center for Economic Studies and Ifo Institute (CESifo)
(where)
Munich
(when)
2020

Handle
Last update
10.03.2025, 11:41 AM CET

Data provider

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Object type

  • Arbeitspapier

Associated

  • Bierbrauer, Felix
  • Boyer, Pierre C.
  • Hansen, Emanuel
  • Center for Economic Studies and Ifo Institute (CESifo)

Time of origin

  • 2020

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