IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/cesifo/v57y2011i2p283-304.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Optimal Taxation and Tax Reform for Two-Earner Households

Author

Listed:
  • Patricia Apps
  • Ray Rees

Abstract

This article is concerned with the question of how two-earner households should be taxed. One reason for the importance of this issue is simply the quantitative significance of households formed around couples. A second reason is that the economic theory of optimal taxation and tax reform, at least as it is presented in the mainstream literature, provides little guidance on this issue, resting as it does on models of the single person household. An old insight in the earlier public finance literature is that any discussion of the taxation of two-person households necessarily involves the recognition of the importance of household production. In this article, we analyse optimal linear taxation and tax reform to put the 'conventional wisdom', which says that it is optimal to tax women on a separate, lower tax schedule than men, on a firmer basis. We also discuss some recent literature on the non-linear taxation of two-earner households. What emerges clearly from the analysis is how centrally important the relationship between productivity in household production and female labour supply really is, and how little we know about it empirically. (JEL codes: H21, H31, H33) Copyright The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Ifo Institute for Economic Research, Munich. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com, Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Patricia Apps & Ray Rees, 2011. "Optimal Taxation and Tax Reform for Two-Earner Households," CESifo Economic Studies, CESifo, vol. 57(2), pages 283-304, June.
  • Handle: RePEc:oup:cesifo:v:57:y:2011:i:2:p:283-304
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/cesifo/ifr012
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Kabátek, Jan & van Soest, Arthur & Stancanelli, Elena, 2014. "Income taxation, labour supply and housework: A discrete choice model for French couples," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 27(C), pages 30-43.
    2. Spencer Bastani, 2013. "Gender-based and couple-based taxation," International Tax and Public Finance, Springer;International Institute of Public Finance, vol. 20(4), pages 653-686, August.
    3. Volker Meier & Matthias Wrede, 2013. "Reducing the excess burden of subsidizing the stork: joint taxation, individual taxation, and family tax splitting," Journal of Population Economics, Springer;European Society for Population Economics, vol. 26(3), pages 1195-1207, July.
    4. Meier, Volker & Rainer, Helmut, 2015. "Pigou meets Ramsey: Gender-based taxation with non-cooperative couples," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 77(C), pages 28-46.
    5. Rigas OIKONOMOU & Christian SIEGEL, 2015. "Capital Taxes, Labor Taxes and the Household," JODE - Journal of Demographic Economics, Cambridge University Press, vol. 81(3), pages 217-260, September.
    6. Kabátek, Jan, 2015. "Essays on public policy and household decision making," Other publications TiSEM 8cdb178e-ad98-42e5-a7e1-b, Tilburg University, School of Economics and Management.
    7. Hans Fehr & Manuel Kallweit & Fabian Kindermann, 2013. "Reforming Family Taxation in Germany - Labor Supply vs. Insurance Effects," CESifo Working Paper Series 4386, CESifo.
    8. Xi CHEN & Ioana SALAGEAN & Benteng ZOU, 2016. "Optimal Income Taxation for the Alleviation of Working-Poverty When Domestic Work is Rewarded," DEM Discussion Paper Series 16-01, Department of Economics at the University of Luxembourg.
    9. Hermann Buslei & Katharina Wrohlich, 2014. "Besteuerung von Paaren: das Ehegattensplitting und seine Alternativen," DIW Roundup: Politik im Fokus 21, DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research.
    10. Takuya Obara & Yoshitomo Ogawa, 2020. "Optimal Taxation in an Endogenous Fertility Model with Non-Cooperative Couples," Discussion Paper Series 211, School of Economics, Kwansei Gakuin University, revised Jan 2021.
    11. Chirvi, Malte, 2019. "Arbeiten Frauen aufgrund des Ehegattensplittings weniger? Eine empirische Untersuchung für Deutschland," arqus Discussion Papers in Quantitative Tax Research 241, arqus - Arbeitskreis Quantitative Steuerlehre.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • H21 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Efficiency; Optimal Taxation
    • H31 - Public Economics - - Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents - - - Household

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:cesifo:v:57:y:2011:i:2:p:283-304. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cesifde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.