Intra-household Labour Income Responses to Changes in Tax Rates Among Older Workers

Despite a large literature estimating the effects of income taxation on the labour decisions of young and middle-aged workers, little is known about the extent to which older workers respond to changes in their income taxes. This paper explores this unresolved empirical issue, using longitudinal administrative data on more than one million individuals from Canada and exploiting a recent tax reform in the empirical identification strategy that explicitly targeted older couples. The findings offer new insight into the “black box” of intra-household labour supply and inform the optimal designs of income tax and retirement income systems.