abstract: 'The United States changed its tax treatment of married couples in 1948,

  from a system in which each spouse paid taxes on his or her own income

  to a system in which a married couple is taxed as a unit. The switch

  from separate to joint taxation changed incentives for labor supply and

  asset ownership. This paper investigates the effects of the conversion

  to joint taxation, taking advantage of a natural experiment created by

  cross-state variation in property laws. Married individuals in states

  with community property laws had always been taxed as if each spouse had

  earned half of the couple''s income, and thus were unaffected by the 1948

  legal change. Comparing the behavior of highly-educated taxpayers in

  affected and unaffected states indicates that the tax change is

  associated with a decline of approximately 2 percentage points in the

  employment rate of married women, consistent with the higher

  first-dollar tax rates they faced after 1948. Women married to

  self-employed men were also less likely to have non-wage income after

  1948, reflecting pre- 1948 allocation of family assets to wives for tax

  purposes. The effects of joint taxation on married men''s labor force

  participation and non-wage income holding are generally not

  statistically significant. (c) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.'
affiliation: 'LaLumia, S (Corresponding Author), Williams Coll, Dept Econ, Seeley
  House 4, Williamstown, MA 01267 USA.

  Williams Coll, Dept Econ, Williamstown, MA 01267 USA.'
author: LaLumia, Sara
author-email: Sara.Lalumia@williams.edu
author_list:
- family: LaLumia
  given: Sara
da: '2023-09-28'
doi: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2008.01.009
files: []
issn: 0047-2727
journal: JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMICS
keywords: joint taxation; labor supply
keywords-plus: 'WORLD-WAR-II; HOUSEHOLD PRODUCTION; TAX UNIT; SEPARATE TAXATION;

  PARTICIPATION; REFORM; WOMEN'
language: English
month: JUL
number: '7'
number-of-cited-references: '44'
pages: 1698-1719
papis_id: 8a31293d3d5d7906833dc1080e042c4a
ref: Lalumia2008effectsjoint
times-cited: '30'
title: The effects of joint taxation of married couples on labor supply and non-wage
  income
type: Article
unique-id: WOS:000257052100009
usage-count-last-180-days: '1'
usage-count-since-2013: '21'
volume: '92'
web-of-science-categories: Economics
year: '2008'