Political feasibility of French income tax reforms

We study recent income tax reforms in France from a political economy perspective. Building on Bierbrauer et al. (2021), who establish that the median voter is decisive for reforms where the change in the tax burden is monotonic in income, we make three contributions. First, using administrative tax data and a microsimulation model, we show that major French tax reforms since 2002 have been monotonic. Second, median voter support consistently aligned with majority support across all major reforms. Third, we compute upper and lower Pareto bounds for a range of taxable income elasticities. Violations of these bounds indicate situations where self-financing tax cuts are possible. This characterization identifies the space of politically feasible reforms. For elasticities below 0.25, the French tax system lies below the upper Pareto bound, while the lower bound remains far from the current schedule for conventional elasticity values.