The (progressive) income tax
Sébastien Laffitte and Wouter Leenders
Almost two centuries after its permanent introduction in the United Kingdom, the income tax remains a central pillar of modern tax systems around the world. Initially conceived as a levy on the better-off, it gradually expanded into a mass tax as states developed the administrative and political capacity to assess, collect, and enforce it. Yet in many countries today, it is exactly the wealthiest households who can most easily avoid the progressive income tax.
This course adopts a comparative method: over time, across space, and across disciplines. It examines how the progressive income tax came to be in different contexts, drawing on work in history, political science, sociology, law, and economics. We focus on the obstacles that delayed adoption, on the mechanisms that ultimately overcame them, and the ways the income tax has evolved since.
Core Reading
1. Seligman and the income tax
Speaker: Madeline Woker (Princeton University)
Date and time: 21 September, 4PM CEST
2. What is income?
Speaker: Conor Clarke (Washington University in St. Louis)
Date and time: 22 October, 4PM CEST
- Clark, Conor, Edward Fox, and Wojciech Kopczuk. 2025. What Made Income Taxes Possible?
- Clark, Conor and Wojciech Kopczuk. 2025. Measuring Income and Income Inequality. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 39 (2), 103-26.
- Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman. 2018. Distributional National Accounts: Methods and Estimates for the United States. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 133 (2): 553-609.
- Haig, Robert. 1921. The Concept of Income-Economic and Legal Aspects. In The Federal Income Tax, edited by Robert Haig, 1-28. Columbia University Press.
- Simons, Henry. 1938. Personal Income Taxation: The Definition of Income as a Problem of Fiscal Policy. University of Chicago Press.
3. The comparative politics of the income tax
Speaker: David Stasavage (New York University)
Date and time: 16 November, 4PM CET
- Scheve, Kenneth and David Stasavage. The Conscription of Wealth: Mass Warfare and the Demand for Progressive Taxation. International Organization, 64 (4), 529-561.
- Seelkopf, Laura, Moritz Bubek, Edgars Eihmanis, Joseph Ganderson, Julian Limberg, Youssef Mnaili, Paula Zuluaga & Philipp Genschel. 2021. The Rise of Modern Taxation: A New Comprehensive Dataset of Tax Introductions Worldwide. The Review of International Organizations, 16 (1), 239-263.
- Aidt, Toke and Peter Jensen. 2009. The Taxman Tools up: An Event History Study of the Introduction of the Personal Income Tax. Journal of Public Economics, 93 (1-2), 160-175.
- Mares, Isabela and Didac Queralt. 2016. The Non-Democratic Origins of Income Taxation. Comparative Political Studies 48 (14), 1974-2009.
4. The income tax in the United States
Speaker: Ajay Mehrotra (Northwestern University)
Date and time: 14 December, 4PM CET
- Mehrotra, Ajay. 2013. Making the Modern American Fiscal State: Law, Politics, and the Rise of Progressive Taxation, 1877-1929. Cambridge University Press.
- Mehrotra, Ajay. 2005. Envisioning the Modern American Fiscal State: Progressive-Era Economists and the Intellectual Foundations of the U.S. Income Tax. UCLA Law Review 52: 1793-1866.
- Brooks, John and David Gamage. 2024. The Original Meaning of the Sixteenth Amendment. Washington University Law Review 102 (1): 1-81.
- Jensen, Erik. 2001. The Taxing Power, the Sixteenth Amendment, and the Meaning of "Incomes". Arizona State Law Journal 33: 1057-1158.
- Thorndike, Joseph. 2013. Their Fair Share: Taxing the Rich in the Age of FDR. The Urban Institute Press.
- W. Elliot Brownlee. 2004. The Democratic-Statist Tax Regimes, 1916-1941. In Federal Taxation in America: A Short History, 2nd ed., 58-106. Cambridge University Press.
5. The income tax in France
6. The income tax in the United Kingdom
- Daunton, Martin. 2001. Trusting Leviathan: The Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1799-1914. Cambridge University Press.
- Daunton, Martin. 2008. Just Taxes: The Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1914-1979. Cambridge University Press.
- Levi, Margaret. 1989. Introduction of the Income Tax in Eighteenth-Century Britain. In Of Rule and Revenue, 122-144. University of California Press.
- Hutková, Karolina, Ernesto Dal Bó, Lukas Leucht, Noam Yuchtman. 2025. Company-state at Home: the East India Company and the Fiscal System in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Past and Present.
7. Income taxes over the course of development
- Bachas, Pierre, Matthew Fisher-Post, Anders Jensen and Gabriel Zucman. 2024. Capital Taxation, Development, and Globalization: Evidence from a Macro-Historical Database. NBER working paper #29819, May 2024.
- Jensen, Anders, and Jonathan Weigel. 2026. No Taxation without Administration: Bringing the State Back into the Public Finance of Developing Countries. Journal of Economic Literature, 64 (1), 246-280.
- Jensen, Anders. 2022. Employment Structure and the Rise of the Modern Tax System. American Economic Review, 112 (1), 213-234.
- Besley, Timothy, and Torsten Persson. 2013. Taxation and Development. In Handbook of Public Economics, Vol. 5, edited by Alan Auerbach, Raj Chetty, Martin Feldstein, and Emmanuel Saez, 51-110. Elsevier.
- Cogneau, Denis. 2023. Un Empire Bon Marché, Seuil.
8. The income tax in China
- Xu, Yin, and Xiaoqun Xu. 2016. Taxation and State-Building: The Tax Reform under the Nationalist Government in China, 1928-1949. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 48, 17-30.
- Cui, Wei. 2022. Policy Making without Information. In: The Administrative Foundations of the Chinese Fiscal State. Cambridge University Press: 178-201.
- Lin, Shuanglin. 2022. Individual Income Tax Reforms. In: China's Public Finance: Reforms, Challenges, and Options. Cambridge University Press: 97-126.
9. Corporate taxation as progressive taxation
- Bank, Steven. 2010. From Sword to Shield: The Transformation of the Corporate Income Tax, 1861 to Present, Oxford University Press.
- Avi-Yonah, Reuven. 2005. The Story of the Separate Corporate Income Tax: A Vehicle for Regulating Corporate Managers. In Business Tax Stories, edited by Steven Bank and Kirk Stark, 11-26. Foundation Press.
- Bach, Laurent, Antoine Bozio, Arthur Guillouzic, Clément Malgouyres. 2025. Do Billionaires Pay Taxes?
- Bruil, Arjan, Céline van Essen, Wouter Leenders, Arjan Lejour, Simon Rabaté, Jan Möhlmann. 2025. Inequality and Redistribution in the Netherlands.
- Balkir, Akcan, Emmanuel Saez, Danny Yagan, and Gabriel Zucman. 2025. How Much Tax Do US Billionaires Pay? Evidence from Administrative Data. NBER Working Paper No. 34170.