Sunday, November 4, 2012

Monday: Lisa Philipps on Income Splitting at McGill

Professor Lisa Philipps will be at McGill this Monday, where she will present a paper as part of our Tax Policy Colloquium Series.  Her paper, entitled Income Splitting and Gender Equality: The Case for Incentivizing Intra-household Wealth Transfers, is a chapter in Challenging Gender Inequality in Tax Policy Making: Comparative Perspectives (Kim Brooks, Asa Gunnarsson, Lisa Philipps, Maria Wersig, eds., Oxford: Hart Publishing Inc, 2011).

It opens as follows:
In this chapter, I examine the problem of income splitting under an individual tax unit and Canadian legal developments that have expanded the scope for such tax planning by spouses. Income splitting poses a dilemma for tax policy analysts concerned with gender equality because, left unchecked, it opens a back door to joint taxation, with its troubling impact on labour-market incentives for secondary earners, who are mainly women. Yet ignoring intra-familial transfers in order to prevent income splitting may disrespect women's individual agency over property to which they hold legal title, and it may close off a potential source of economic power for those who do the bulk of the unpaid work in a household. This tax policy dilemma engages fundamental, normative debates about the meaning of gender equality and whether it is possible to enhance women's access to markets while also valuing and compensating their unpaid contributions. 

The Colloquium is open to all.  If you will be in Montreal tomorrow, I invite you to join us at 11:35 am at the McGill Law Faculty, Chancellor Day Hall Room 202, 3644 Peel Street.

No comments:

Post a Comment