Are reforms towards individual taxation politically feasible? Are they desirable from a welfare perspective? We develop a novel method to answer such questions and apply it to the US federal income tax since the 1960s. Main findings are: As of today, Pareto-improvements require a move away from joint taxation. Revenue-neutral reforms towards individual taxation are not Pareto-improving, but attract majority-support. Such reforms are rejected by Rawlsian welfare measures and supported by ones with weights that are increasing in the secondary earner’s in-come share. Thus, there is a tension between the welfare of “the poor”and the welfare of “working women.”

Goldin (2014) highlights the role of hours flexibility across occupations as a source of gender wage inequality. We ask how the tax system, in terms of jointness and progressivity, affects occupational choice, work hours and wages across occupations, and the gender wage gap. The decision to work in a high-wage/high-hours occupation depends on the earnings gained from being in that occupation and the cost of having less leisure time. Taxation affects this trade-off in an ambiguous way. Calibrating the model to US data, we find that the impact of (1) introducing individual taxation and (2) removing tax progressivity via a flat tax on occupational choice is relatively small: the share of women working in long-hours occupation increases by at most 0.7pp. By contrast, endogenous wages play an essential role in amplifying the effects of tax reforms due to the positive impact of long work hours on wages.

This paper uses a permanent reduction of the "tampon tax"' in Germany to study the price and unit-sales effects of the tax. Exploiting an extensive data set on the sales and scanner prices of feminine hygiene products in Germany and Italy, our results show that the incidence of tampon taxes is fully on consumers, while demand for these products is price-inelastic. We do not find cross-price effects for a closely related product group, which remained taxed at the standard tax rate. We conclude that reducing taxes on feminine hygiene products could be an effective measure to address "period poverty"'.

While the correlation between working and voting is positive, I provide some of the first evidence that the causal relationship for individuals is negative. Instrumenting for working using EITC expansions and welfare reform, I find that working women are less likely to vote and become more politically conservative. Consistent with these effects, I find decreases in being registered to vote, civic participation, and political knowledge, and increased preferences for conservative government policies. Effects are driven by younger, White, lower-educated mothers, that did not have a working mother growing up, and are consistent across four data sources that span five decades. Overall, working leads to more votes for Republicans and less votes for Democrats. While recent decades have seen more and more women voting Democrat, even more women would have voted Democrat if not for decades of pro-work public policy targeting lower-income mothers.