Income taxes

Income taxes

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Income taxes

Showing 101 – 120 of 240 results

Parliament Street

What are the options for raising taxes?

Explainer
If the Chancellor wants to meet his commitments to eliminate the deficit, and provide extra funding for the NHS, he will need to lower spending elsewh

17 October 2018

Book graphic

Options for raising taxes

Book Chapter
This Green Budget chapter considers where the Chancellor might look if he wanted to increase tax receipts by about 1% of national income – enough to pay for the promised increase in NHS spending. We investigate how various possible tax rises differ in the revenue they would raise, the people who would pay them, and the extent to which they would weaken work incentives and improve or worsen other distortions.

16 October 2018

Article graphic

Lack of employment rights doesn’t justify lower taxes for the self-employed

Comment

There is a current debate about whether the definition of self-employment should be aligned across tax and employment law. At present there is a rather complex situation – illustrated by a recent court case involving Pimlico Plumbers – in which an individual can be deemed a worker in employment law but self-employed in tax law. The definitions matter because they determine who gets access to employment rights and who gets preferential tax treatment.

19 June 2018

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Scottish income tax diverges further from rest of UK to raise more from high earners

Comment

For the new 2018–19 tax year, the Scottish higher-rate threshold has fallen further behind that in the UK, and two new income tax bands have been added in Scotland while the higher- and additional-rates have been increased. While most Scots will be either unaffected or pay slightly less in tax, overall the change will raise revenue as a result of higher earners paying more. This observation argues that while these changes represent small tweaks to the system rather than a major overhaul, differences between the Scottish and UK income tax systems could have significant implications for taxpayer behaviour going forward.

6 April 2018

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Is our tax system fair? It depends...

Comment

The basic question of whether our tax system is fair is at the heart of many of our public debates. Discussions of whether ‘the rich’ or companies are paying their ‘fair share’ is regularly in, or underlying, the news headlines. These are important questions. If we want to ensure that we can raise the revenues to pay for the public goods and services that we all want, we need to be able to have sensible debates about how much tax we raise, who we raise it from and how we spend it.

3 November 2017

Publication graphic

Who does and doesn’t pay taxes?

Report

This briefing note summarises new research on which types of people under-report the taxes they owe, and what effects audits have on government revenue.

26 October 2017

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How do the rich respond to higher income tax rates?

Comment

This Briefing Note presents new analysis of how high income taxpayers respond to changes in income tax rates. The Note is based on three new Working Papers, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, the Economic and Social Research Council and the European Research Council.

22 August 2017

Working paper graphic

Tax avoidance and optimal income tax enforcement

Working Paper

We examine the optimal auditing problem of a tax authority when taxpayers can choose both to evade and avoid. For a convex penalty function the incentive-compatibility constraints may bind for the richest taxpayer and at a positive level of both evasion and avoidance. The audit function is non-increasing in reported income, and is higher for progressive tax functions than for regressive tax functions. Higher marginal tax rates increase the incentives for non-compliance, overturning the well-known Yitzhaki paradox.

7 June 2017