Linear Tax Research Articles

Nonlinear tax-induced migration: an overlooked tale

The empirical literature on tax-induced migration (TIM) primarily focused on estimating the average elasticity of migration to interregional tax differentials but ignores the potential effect of the variations around this average. This paper extends the work of Moretti and Wilson (Am Econ Rev 107:1858–1903, 2017) and finds salient nonlinearity in the TIM of star scientists between 1977 and 2010. The results suggest that differences in personal income tax and research and development (R & D) tax credits between two states generate nonlinear impacts on migration; there is evidence of an important inertia range in which the differences generate little impact on migration. In contrast, the corporate income tax has approximately linear effects and investment tax credit has consistent effects only when the destination state initially has higher credits than the origin state. As different taxes or tax credits have distinctive nonlinear effects on migration, decision makers are cautioned of using average elasticities of TIM in policy making.

Marginal deadweight loss when the income tax is nonlinear

Most theoretical work on how to calculate the marginal deadweight loss has been done for linear taxes and for variations in linear budget constraints. This is quite surprising because most income tax systems are nonlinear, generating nonlinear budget constraints. Instead of developing the proper procedure to calculate the marginal deadweight loss for variations in nonlinear income taxes, a common procedure has been to linearize the nonlinear budget constraint and apply methods that are correct for variations in a linear income tax. Such a procedure leads to incorrect results. The main purpose of this paper is to show how to correctly calculate the marginal deadweight loss when the income tax is nonlinear. A second purpose is to evaluate the bias in results that obtains when a linearization procedure is used. Our main theoretical result is that the overall curvature of the tax system plays the same role as the curvature of indifference curves for the size of the marginal deadweight loss. Using numerical simulations calibrated on US data, we show that common linearization procedures may lead to substantial overestimation of the marginal deadweight loss.

How local in time is the no-arbitrage property under capital gains taxes?

In frictionless financial markets, no-arbitrage is a local property in time. This means that a discrete time model is arbitrage-free if and only if there does not exist a one-period-arbitrage. With capital gains taxes, this equivalence fails. For a model with a linear tax and one non-shortable risky stock, we introduce the concept of robust local no-arbitrage (RLNA) as the weakest local condition which guarantees dynamic no-arbitrage. Under a sharp dichotomy condition, we prove (RLNA). Since no-one-period-arbitrage is necessary for no-arbitrage, the latter is sandwiched between two local conditions, which allows us to estimate its non-locality. Furthermore, we construct a stock price process such that two long positions in the same stock hedge each other. This puzzling phenomenon that cannot occur in arbitrage-free frictionless markets (or markets with proportional transaction costs) is used to show that no-arbitrage alone does not imply the existence of an equivalent separating measure if the probability space is infinite. Finally, we show that the model with a linear tax on capital gains can be written as a model with proportional transaction costs by introducing several fictitious securities.

Heterogeneity, monetary policy, Mirrleesian taxes, and the Friedman rule

We consider an overlapping-generations economy with money rationalized through a cash-in-advance constraint and heterogeneous agents subject to nonlinear taxation of labor income and linear taxation of commodity purchases. Some agents are more productive and more financially connected than others leading to their earning more income and requiring a proportionately smaller cash reserve to mediate their expenditures. We show that a nonlinear income tax can always fully neutralize the redistributive implications of who gets the extra money. On the other hand, with differences in financial connectedness, the tax policy cannot neutralize the redistributive implications of the monetary growth rate. Nevertheless the Friedman rule is found to be often desirable as a corner solution without having to impose arbitrary restrictions on the structure of agents’ preferences. At the same time, the differences in connectedness may result in the violation of the Friedman rule.

Davki, državna potrošnja in gospodarski razvoj

The author of this article shows some of the relationships between long term welfare and taxes. The aim is to compile a theoretically sound foundation with empirical investigation of impacts of taxes on welfare. The analysis brings a compilation of fundamental growth models and empirical investigations of the effects of budgetary neutral tax reform. Empirical studies favour consumption taxes before income taxes and linear taxes before progressive taxes. Comparisons of tax effects across countries need to take into account the structure of public spending and particularly the functioning of institutions that support economic development.

Optimal Taxes on Capital in the OLG Model with Uninsurable Idiosyncratic Income Risk

We characterize the optimal linear tax on capital in an Overlapping Generations model with two period lived households facing uninsurable idiosyncratic labor income risk. The Ramsey government internalizes the general equilibrium feedback of private precautionary saving. For logarithmic utility our full analytical solution of the Ramsey problem shows that the optimal aggregate saving rate is independent of income risk. The optimal time-invariant tax on capital is increasing in income risk. Its sign depends on the extent of risk and on the Pareto weight of future generations. If the Ramsey tax rate that maximizes steady state utility is positive, then implementing this tax rate permanently generates a Pareto-improving transition even if the initial equilibrium is dynamically efficient. We generalize our results to Epstein-Zin-Weil utility and show that the optimal steady state saving rate is increasing in income risk if and only if the intertemporal elasticity of substitution is smaller than 1.

Optimal Taxes on Capital in the OLG Model with Uninsurable Idiosyncratic Income Risk

We characterize the optimal linear tax on capital in an Overlapping Generations model with two period lived households facing uninsurable idiosyncratic labor income risk. The Ramsey government internalizes the general equilibrium feedback of private precautionary saving. For logarithmic utility our full analytical solution of the Ramsey problem shows that the optimal aggregate saving rate is independent of income risk. The optimal time-invariant tax on capital is increasing in income risk. Its sign depends on the extent of risk and on the Pareto weight of future generations. If the Ramsey tax rate that maximizes steady state utility is positive, then implementing this tax rate permanently generates a Pareto-improving transition even if the initial equilibrium is dynamically efficient. We generalize our results to Epstein-Zin-Weil utility and show that the optimal steady state saving rate is increasing in income risk if and only if the intertemporal elasticity of substitution is smaller than 1.

Flexible Retirement and Optimal Taxation

This paper studies optimal insurance against private idiosyncratic shocks in a life-cycle model with intensive labor supply and endogenous retirement. In this environment, the optimal labor tax is hump-shaped in age: insurance benefits of taxation push for increasing-in-age taxes while rising labor supply elasticities and optimal late retirement of highly productive workers push for lowering taxes for old workers. In calibrated numerical simulations, the optimum achieves sizable welfare gains that age-dependent taxes do not deliver under the status quo US Social Security. Nevertheless, an optimal combination of age-dependent linear taxes with increasing-in-age retirement benefits generates welfare gains close to optimal.

Capital taxation and government debt policy with public discounting

This paper characterizes capital taxation and public debt policy in a quantitative macroeconomic model with an impatient government and uncertainty. The government has access to linear taxes on capital and labor, and to non-state-contingent bonds. Government impatience generates positive and empirically realistic long-run levels of both capital taxes and public debt. Prior predictive analysis shows that the simulated model matches the distribution of both variables in a sample of 42 countries, alongside other statistics. The paper then presents econometric evidence that countries with higher political instability, used as an approximation of unobservable public discount rates, have both higher capital taxes and debt.

Utilitarian preference for redistribution: a concern with max-min

This paper studies an optimal linear tax or basic income regime with an extensive margin in the supply of labor and a utililitarian welfare criterion. The presence the extensive margin in labor supply breaks the connection between allocational efficiency and aggregate utility maximization. In a general framework, some redistribution maximizes aggregate utility, but a lesser degree than what Rawls’ max-min criterion would require. Rawls’ concept of the Original Position is useful, but the rationality of the max-min criterion is questionable.

How much to share: Welfare effects of fiscal transfers

AbstractRecent sovereign debt crisis has challenged policy makers to explore the possibility of establishing a fiscal transfer system that could alleviate the negative impact of asymmetric shocks across countries. Using a simple labour production economy, we first derive an analytically tractable solution for optimal degree of fiscal transfers. In this economy, fiscal transfers can improve welfare by moving the competitive equilibrium with fiscal transfers closer to the social planner's solution. We then extend the model to a DSGE setting with capital, international bond and linear taxes, and we analyze how implementation of a simple revenue sharing rule affects welfare and macroeconomic variables over time. Simulation results show that risk sharing through fiscal transfers always improves welfare in the long run. However, under certain model specifications, short‐run transitional welfare loss can outweigh the long‐run benefits. These results suggest that, in designing fiscal transfers across countries, government should take into consideration the intertemporal nature of welfare gains.

Optimal taxation and public provision for poverty reduction

The existing literature on optimal taxation typically assumes there exists a capacity to implement complex tax schemes, which is not necessarily the case for many developing countries. We examine the determinants of optimal redistributive policies in the context of a developing country that can only implement linear tax policies due to administrative reasons. Further, the reduction of poverty is typically the expressed goal of such countries, and this feature is also taken into account in our model. We derive the optimality conditions for linear income taxation, commodity taxation, and public provision of private and public goods for the poverty minimization case and compare the results to those derived under a general welfarist objective function. We also study the implications of informality on optimal redistributive policies for such countries. The exercise reveals non-trivial differences in optimal tax rules under the different assumptions.

Fiscal Federalism and Optimal Income Taxes

This paper studies how local policies?specifically, taxes on income with redistributive goals?affect the migration decisions of individuals and, in turn, how these migration decisions affect local and economy-wide tax and redistribution policies. The author develops a model of optimal taxation for a federal system of governments in the tradition of Mirrlees (1971), where taxes can be fully nonlinear but informational asymmetries prevent the equalization of well being across workers due to informational rents. This article extends the large literature on federalism and tax competition by obtaining optimal tax formulas for the federal and state governments. The literature has mainly focused on inefficiencies that arise due to fiscal externalities when governments have access to restricted instruments (for example, allowing only linear taxes). Contrary to previous results in that literature, the author shows here that state governments will provide redistribution through taxes and that, in a symmetric equilibrium, the overall tax schedule that combines the actions of both the federal and state governments is the same as that of a unitary government. This implies that, under the conditions analyzed in the model, there is no reason to restrict income redistribution objectives to the federal government only, as commonly prescribed in the literature.

Optimal Income Taxation with Composition Effects

Providing estimable sufficient statistics to give policy prescriptions has become a widespread approach over the recent years. A well-known limitation of this approach is the endogeneity of sufficient statistics to the policy. In this paper, using optimal tax policy as our field of application, we highlight a new source of endogeneity. It arises since, under multidimensional heterogeneity, optimal tax formulas are expressed as a function of weighted means of sufficient statistics computed at the individual level and the weights are endogenous to tax policy. We analytically show that ignoring these composition effects leads to underestimate the optimal linear tax and, under a restrictive set of assumptions, the optimal nonlinear tax as well. To relax these assumptions, we use an improved tax perturbation approach to study composition effects in the latter case. Our numerical simulations using U.S. data suggest the optimal tax rate may be underestimated by 6 percentage points for high incomes levels. As a secondary result, we show the equivalence between our improved tax perturbation method and the first order mechanism design method, two methods which have hitherto been used separately to derive optimal tax schedules.

Capital Taxation and Government Debt Policy with Public Discounting

Abstract This paper characterizes capital taxation and public debt policy in a quantitative macroeconomic model with an impatient government and uncertainty. The government has access to linear taxes on capital and labor, and to non-state-contingent bonds. Government impatience generates positive and empirically realistic long-run levels of both capital taxes and public debt. Prior predictive analysis shows that the simulated model matches the distribution of both variables in a sample of 42 countries, alongside other statistics. The paper then presents econometric evidence that countries with higher political instability, used as an approximation of unobservable public discount rates, have both higher capital taxes and debt.

For what trading strategies is the tax payment stream of infinite variation?

ABSTRACTFor an Itô asset price process and under quite mild structural assumptions, we show that the accumulated payments of a linear tax on trading gains are of infinite variation if the quadratic covariation of the trading strategy and the asset price is negative. By contrast, if the strategy is a smooth function of the asset price and some finite variation processes with positive partial derivative with respect to the price variable, then accumulated tax payments are of finite variation. An interesting example are constant proportion portfolio insurance (CPPI) strategies which we extend to models with capital gains taxes. The associated tax payment stream is of finite variation if the tax-adjusted constant multiple of the cushion which is invested in the risky asset is bigger or equal to one. Otherwise, it is of infinite variation.

Dynamic and Cross-Platform Optimal Financial Transaction Taxation

This paper analyzes the welfare implications of a linear financial transactions tax in a multi-period portfolio selection model with heterogeneous agents. Under certain conditions over the redistribution of government revenues, with no Pigouvian motives, I find such a tax may induce first-order losses due to the distortion of idiosyncratic risk-sharing. A transaction tax induces both a contemporaneous inaction region and intertemporal shifting of transaction realizations. Given a segmented market over multiple trading platforms and the choice of at least two different tax instruments, I develop sufficient statistic formulas that differ from standard optimal commodity tax theory in that they account for untaxed capital accumulation, market structure rents, and uncertain returns.

Quality standards versus nutritional taxes: Health and welfare impacts with strategic firms

The goal of this paper is to better understand firms' strategic reactions to nutritional policies targeting food quality improvements and to derive optimal policies. We propose a model of product differentiation, taking into account the taste and health characteristics of products. We study how two firms react to alternative policies: an MQS policy, linear taxation of the two goods on the market, and taxation of the low-quality good. The MQS and the taxation of the low-quality product are the preferred options by a social planner. If taste is moderately important, the MQS policy is chosen by a populist and a paternalist social planner. If taste is a major component of choice, the populist planner chooses to tax the low-quality product whereas the paternalist planner prefers the MQS policy. Finally, for a paternalist social planner, an MQS-based policy always allows for higher levels of welfare than an information policy alone.

An allegory of the political influence of the top 1%

We study how rich shareholders use their political influence to deregulate firms that they own, thus skewing the income distribution towards themselves. Individuals differ in productivity and choose how much labor to supply. High productivity individuals also own shares in the productive sector and thus earn capital income. All individuals vote over a linear tax rate on (labor and capital) income whose proceeds are redistributed lump sum. Shareholders also lobby in order to ease the price cap imposed on the private firm. We first solve analytically for the Kantian equilibrium of this lobbying game together with the majority voting equilibrium over the tax rate. We then proceed to a comparative statics analysis of the model with the help of numerical simulations. We obtain that, as the capital income distribution becomes more concentrated among the top productivity individuals, increased lobbying effort generates efficiency as well as equity costs, with lower labor supply and lower average utility levels in society.

The Provision of Language‐Specific Public Services

AbstractI consider the optimal provision of public services when individuals' effective consumption of the services depends on their proficiency in the language they are provided in. A social planner chooses levels of provision in both a dominant and minority language which are financed by a linear tax on labor income. Minority language speakers make a costly investment to increase their proficiency in the dominant language. In doing so they increase their wage and, possibly, gain access to higher levels of public services provided in the dominant language. The planner faces a trade‐off between compensating minority language speakers for their lower wages and encouraging their integration by rewarding higher levels of dominant language proficiency. Under majority voting, it is possible that the level of public services is increasing in the relative size of the minority language community. This result contrasts with what is typically assumed in the literature on fractionalization and public good provision—that cultural heterogeneity decreases the level of public goods.