Although coworkers are spending an increasing share of their working time interacting with one another, little is known about how the coordination of hours among heterogenous coworkers affects pay, productivity and labor supply. In this paper, we use new linked employer-employee data on hours worked in Denmark to first document evidence of positive correlations between...

We examine Australia's Mature Age Worker Tax offset (MAWTO), a targeted earned income tax credit of up to $500 to incentivize participation of older workers that existed from 2004-05 to 2014-15. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that MAWTO increased labor market participation by around 0.5 percentage points. For women only, it had a small...

I define a new tax instrument, the ‘deductibility rate’, which specifies the proportion of eligible expenses a taxpayer may deduct when preparing her taxes. If the utilities of gross income and deductions are separable, then the deduction elasticity reflects the revenue leakage caused by greater deductibility. To identify this elasticity, I develop the first method...

This paper provides theoretical and empirical evidence on the implications of the timing of reminders by studying the effect of varying the timing of reminder letters to taxpayers on their payment behavior. The collection of unpaid tax debts constitutes a considerable challenge for tax authorities. We show that varying the timing of a reminder letter...

We study optimal income tax progressivity in an environment where individuals are exposed to idiosyncratic income and health risks over the lifecycle. Our results, based on a calibration for the US economy, indicate that the presence of health risk combined with incomplete insurance markets amplifies the social insurance role of progressive income taxes. The government...