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Title :The Taxation of Couples


Abstract :  This paper studies the tax treatment of couples. We develop two different approaches. One is tailored to the analysis of tax systems that stick to the principle that the tax base for couples is the sum of their incomes. One is tailored to the analysis of reforms toward individual taxation. We study the US federal income tax since the 1960s through the lens of this framework. We find that, in the recent past, realizing efficiency gains requires lowering marginal tax rates for secondary earners. We also find that revenue-neutral reforms towards individual taxation are in the interest of couples with high secondary earnings while couples with low secondary earnings are worse off. The support for such a reform recently passed the majority threshold. It is rejected, however, by a Rawlsian social welfare function. Thus, there is a tension between Rawlsian and Feminist notions of social welfare.

18^th Belgian Environmental Economics Days – BEED 2025

février 2024

9 – 6 pm

Registration link : https://forms.office.com/e/XPA8iynXiD (deadline for registration, Thursday Jan 23, 2025)

Keynote session : Linking supply chain and Earth Observation data for improving the transparency and sustainability of commodity supply chains (Patrick Meyfroidt,  UC Louvain

Programme TBA

Contact : Julia.jadin@ulb.be

Title: On the Endogenous Order of Play in Sequential Games

Abstract: Cases abound in political or industrial competition where it is not reasonable to assume that agents will passively wait for their turn to act. We formalize, under the name of games of addition, the strategic interaction between agents who sequentially take actions, but may also agree unanimously to stop taking further actions and collect the payoffs associated with the given sequence of moves. Our formalization differs from that of extensive form games in that the order of the agents’ moves is not predetermined but emerges endogenously when applying an adapted version of a solution concept proposed by Dutta, Jackson, and Le Breton (2004). We provide results regarding the properties of solutions to games of addition, and we also demonstrate that the predicted outcomes may significantly differ from those obtained if using extensive form

games and subgame perfection as alternative tools of analysis.