Category Archives: Tax

My AFR op-ed today is on tobacco and alcohol taxes. Full text over the fold. Some references are hyperlinked, and there’s more detail at the end of the piece.

My AFR op-ed today is on the economic incidence of company taxes. The draft benefited from comments by Nicholas Gruen and an anonymous friend. Full text over the fold.

I’ve been pushing for several years for a simplified tax filing system, in which the ATO would send all Australians a pre-filled return, with the option of choosing to accept it with a simple phonecall (though if a person wanted … Continue reading →

A splendid new paper sums up some of the interesting developments in the field known as behavioral public finance (I wrote about this in my AFR column recently). The abstract is below, and some choice snippets are over the fold. … Continue reading →

Kudos to the Australian Taxation Office, who have just released a 1% sample of Australian taxpayers for the use of researchers. One of the reasons that empirical public finance has been comparatively weak in Australia is the paucity of good … Continue reading →

(Crossposted at Core Economics) One of the most interesting fields in public economics these days is behavioural public finance, which starts from the idea that maybe (just maybe) our standard assumption that every taxpayer has perfect information about the tax … Continue reading →

Misha Schubert has a piece in the Age today looking at the dependent spouse rebate, a payment akin to Family Tax Benefit Part B, but for people without children. I confess to not having given this particular tax rebate a … Continue reading →

Since no-one else seems to be doing it, I’ve been tinkering with the Coalition and ALP tax proposals, trying to look at how they’re distributed across the income spectrum. Here’s my best estimate as to their distribution across the 10 … Continue reading →

I’m embarassed to say that this morning, I nearly fell for a scam-email purporting to be from the Australian Taxation Office, and offering a tax return of “270$”. I console myself with the thought that this is basically what I’ve … Continue reading →

According to Peter Hartcher, markets currently put a 50% probability on the RBA raising rates at its 6 Nov meeting. And not surprisingly, many commentators are predicting that the Coalition’s tax cut package will increase that probability; though the effect … Continue reading →

A couple of new papers suggest that most Australians believe that cheating on your taxes is wrong (62% say that tax evasion is never justifiable), and that Aussies are no more likely to evade tax than Americans or New Zealanders. … Continue reading →

Alberto Alesina and Andrea Ichino have a simple proposal: men and women should face different tax rates. Here is a policy proposal that should make the two camps agree: reduce income taxes on women and increase, by less, income taxes … Continue reading →

Now here’s a paper whose conclusions should make John Howard and Ross Gittins both nod their heads. Labour Taxes and Work Hours in Australia Anton Hallam & Ernst Weber In the 1970s, work hours in Europe were similar to work hours … Continue reading →