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AbstractDuring the late 1 980s and early 1 990s, taxation of wage income has undergone a change towards a proportional tax regime in many countries. Our analysis shows that gradual tax reforms in Norway may have removed some of the distortions on worker behavior. Moreover, we find that proportional taxes may reduce the inequality in the distribution of disposable household income. Yet, when the distributional consequences are related to changes in individual welfare, we find that rich households may benefit far more than households at the other tail of the income distribution, because they earn more without any significant increase in effort.
In this paper we discuss a general framework for analyzing labor supply behavior in the presence of complicated budget-and quantity constraints of which some are unobserved. The point of departure is that an individual's labor supply decision can be considered as a choice from a set of discrete alternatives (jobs). These jobs are characterized by attributes such as hours of work, sector specific wages and other sector specific aspects of the jobs. We focus in particular on theoretical justification of functional form assumptions and properties of the random components of the model. The paper includes an empirical application based on Norwegian data, in which the labor supply of married women is estimated.JEL classification: J22,C51.Key words: Labor supply, non-convex budget sets, non-pecuniary job-attributes, sector-specific wages. ___________________________________ * Statistics Norway, Oslo. E-mail: john.dagsvik@ssb.no ** Department of Economics, University of Oslo. E-mail: steinar.strom@econ.uio.no We are indebted to Tom Wennemo for skillful programming assistance and Rolf Aaberge for constructive critisism throughout the revision process. We thank two anonymous referees and the editor for useful comments and helpful suggestions.We also thank James J. Heckman for valuable comments on an earlier version of the paper and Anne Skoglund for proof reading and word processing. S.Strøm is grateful to ICER, Turin, for providing excellent working conditions. 2
A crucial issue in efficiency-equality evaluations of tax reforms resides in the possibility that the level as well as the distribution of welfare may change, where the household-specific measures of welfare capture the value of income as well as the value of leisure. A better-designed redistribution and income support system may not only foster equality but also improve the configuration of incentives and by this route contribute in its turn to efficiency. This paper presents an empirical analysis of the welfare effects for married couples of replacing the Italian tax system by three alternative hypothetical reforms: a flat tax, a negative income tax, and a work fare scheme. We employ a microeconometric model of household labour supply that represents partners' simultaneous choices, allows for constraints in the choice of hours of work, and is sufficiently flexible to capture a large variety of supply responses. These features appear to be crucial in the evaluation of reform effects. The results suggest that there is scope for improving upon the current system under both the efficiency and the equality criterion. The benefits from the reforms, however, come from unexpected directions since the largest contribution to the increase in welfare come from poor and middle class households whereas rich households appear to be much less responsive to changes in the tax rates. The simulation results reveal that a crucial role in shaping the results is played by the relatively higher behavioural responsiveness of married women living in low and average income households.
This paper employs a microeconometric framework to examine the labor supply responses and the welfare effects from replacing current tax systems in Italy, Norway and Sweden by a flat tax on total income. The flat tax rates are determined so that the tax revenues are equal to the revenues as of 1992. The flat tax rates vary from 23 per cent in Italy, 25 per cent in Norway, to 29 per cent in Sweden. In all three countries the labor supply responses decline sharply with pre-reform disposable income. The results show that the efficiency costs of the current tax systems relative to a flat tax may be rather high in Norway and much lower, but positive, in Italy and Sweden. In all three countries "rich" households -defined by their pretax-reform income -tend to benefit (in terms of welfare) more than "poor" households. In Italy and Sweden a majority will lose from a shift to a flat tax, while in Norway a majority is predicted to win.
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