The DOI matches its Crossref record.
Tax Avoidance and the Deadweight Loss of the Income Tax
Open accessAbstract
Traditional analyses of the income tax greatly underestimate deadweight losses by ignoring its effect on forms of compensation and patterns of consumption. The full deadweight loss is easily calculated using the compensated elasticity of taxable income to changes in tax rates because leisure, excludable income, and deductible consumption are a Hicksian composite good. Microeconomic estimates imply a deadweight loss of as much as 30% of revenue or more than ten times Harberger's classic 1964 estimate. The relative deadweight loss caused by increasing existing tax rates is substantially greater and may exceed $2 per $1 of revenue.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
No references could be resolved yet.
Research works printed but not linked: 8
- Ballard C., 1985, American Economic Review, 77, 128
- Browning E., 1987, American Economic Review, 77, 11
- 10.1086/261994 · DOI · Paper page
- Feldstein M., 1995, American Economic Review, 85, 170
- Feldstein M., 1992, National Tax Journal, 45, 1, 10.1086/NTJ41788943 · DOI
- 10.1016/0047-2727(87)90073-9 · DOI
- Stuart C., 1984, American Economic Review, 74, 352
- Triest R., 1992, this REVIEW, 74, 91
Cited by
The rate of return to the HighScope Perry Preschool Program
Heckman, J. J., Moon, S. H., Pinto, R., Savelyev, P. A., & Yavitz, A. (2010) · Journal of Public Economics · doi:10.1016/j.jpubeco.2009.11.001 · Cited by 1,341
“60 See Browning (1987), Heckman and Smith (1998), Heckman et al. (1999), and Feldstein (1999) for discussion of estimates of deadweight costs.”
Do Taxpayers Bunch at Kink Points?
Saez, E. (2010) · American Economic Journal: Economic Policy · doi:10.1257/pol.2.3.180 · Cited by 950
Optimal Taxation of Top Labor Incomes: A Tale of Three Elasticities
Piketty, T., Saez, E., & Stantcheva, S. (2014) · American Economic Journal: Economic Policy · doi:10.1257/pol.6.1.230 · Cited by 713
Cost-effectiveness of supported housing for homeless persons with mental illness.
Rosenheck, R., Kasprow, W., Frisman, L., & Liu-Mares, W. (2003) · Archives of General Psychiatry · doi:10.1001/archpsyc.60.9.940 · Cited by 354
Tax bases, tax rates and the elasticity of reported income
Kopczuk, W. (2005) · Journal of Public Economics · doi:10.1016/j.jpubeco.2004.12.005 · Cited by 315
Tax farming redux: experimental evidence on performance pay for tax collectors
Khan, A. Q., Khwaja, A. I., & Olken, B. A. (2016) · The Quarterly Journal of Economics · doi:10.1093/qje/qjv042 · Cited by 267
(2010) · RePEc: Research Papers in Economics · Cited by 221
Metadata
- Authors
- Feldstein, M.
- Venue
- Review of Economics and Statistics
- Publisher
- MIT Press - Journals
- Published
- 1999-11
- Volume
- 81
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 674-680
- ISSN
- 0034-6535 (ISSN-L)
- 1530-9142
- OpenAlex
- W2889716373
- Cited by
- 812
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 50.56
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
