Ramsey Tax Research Articles

Optimal redistributive policy in debt constrained economies

How should governments with a preference for redistribution design tax policies when facing limited borrowing? This paper studies optimal taxation in a small open economy with heterogeneous agents and endogenous debt constraints arising from the government's limited commitment to fiscal policies. The optimal labor tax decreases over time and is nonzero in the limit, and the optimal capital and domestic borrowing taxes are positive in the limit, deviating from the standard Ramsey tax results. The government's redistributive motive directly affects optimal tax levels, whereas binding debt constraints influence optimal tax dynamics. In the numerical analysis, a stronger redistributive preference requires greater initial tax distortions and a higher external debt level in the long run.

How should the use of nonrenewables be taxed under a public budget constraint?

Most developed countries will be facing severe public budget constraints. We examine how extraction or use of nonrenewable resources should be taxed when governments need to collect commodity tax revenues. Moreover, we show how our results can be directly used to indicate how carbon taxation of nonrenewable energy sources should be increased in the presence of public-revenue needs. The obtained tax formula is an augmented, dynamic version of the standard Ramsey taxation rule. It distorts developed reserves, which are reduced, and their depletion, which is slowed down, going further in the direction prescribed for the resolution of the climate externality. We present a simple calibrated application of our results to illustrate how carbon taxation of oil should be strongly augmented, and the incidence of this adjustment on oil use and tax revenues.

Organizational capital and optimal Ramsey taxation

Many recent studies have argued that it is useful to introduce a third input into the neoclassical production technology which encapsulates the productivity enhancing knowledge created in the process of production. This input, often called organizational capital, has been shown to improve the predictions of dynamic general equilibrium models, especially at the business cycle frequency. In this paper, we study the impact of organizational capital on optimal taxation in the Ramsey tradition and find that the planner would behave quite differently in the presence of organizational capital than in its absence. We use simulations to show that the optimal capital income tax is different from zero in environments where earlier models predicted zero taxes or even subsidies. In the model, both capital and labor taxes distort the accumulation of organizational capital and the planner must trade off these dynamic distortions to fund the obligations of the government. As a result, the planner chooses a positive tax on labor and capital. Generally the tax on labor income is lower while that on capital income is higher than predicted in the absence of organizational capital.

Rising skill premium and the dynamics of optimal capital and labor taxation

With capital‐skill complementarity, the secular decline in the price of capital equipment due to equipment‐specific technological progress (ESTP) keeps pushing up the demand for skilled relative to unskilled labor and raising the skill premium. This paper quantitatively characterizes the dynamics of optimal taxation in response. Two main results emerge, regardless of whether the Ramsey (1927) or the Mirrlees (1971) approach is adopted. First, a tax on capital equipment corrects the “pecuniary externalities” caused by ESTP. The correction prescribes a downward or an upward adjustment of tax rates over time, depending on whether ESTP takes place at an accelerated or a decelerated pace. Second, both Ramsey and Mirrlees approaches prescribe an increasing marginal tax rate on labor income over time. Interestingly, we find that the prescribed pattern of optimal taxation resembles the empirical decline in capital taxes and the increase in labor taxes observed in the United States. In particular, despite the significant rise in the skill premium, the welfare gains of tax reform toward optimal Ramsey taxes are modest and small.

How Should We Tax the Use of Nonrenewables Under a Public Budget Constraint?

Most developed countries will be facing severe public budget constraints. We derive a formula for how extraction or use of nonrenewable resources should be taxed when governments need to collect commodity tax revenues. Moreover, we show how it can be directly used to indicate how carbon taxation should be increased in the presence of public-revenue needs. The obtained tax is an augmented, dynamic version of the standard Ramsey taxation rule. It distorts developed reserves, which are reduced, and their depletion, which is slowed down, going further in the direction prescribed for the resolution of the climate externality. We present a simple calibrated application of our results to illustrate how the carbon taxation of oil should be augmented, and the incidence on oil use and tax revenues.

Optimal Ramsey taxation in heterogeneous agent economies with quasi-linear preferences

We build a tractable heterogeneous-agent incomplete-markets model with quasi-linear preferences to address a set of long-standing issues in the optimal Ramsey taxation literature. The tractability of our model enables us to analytically prove the existence of the Ramsey steady state and establish several novel results within standard parameter spaces: (i) The failure of the modified golden rule (MGR) cannot by itself justify a positive steady-state capital tax—we prove that in the absence of wealth-redistribution effects the optimal capital tax is exclusively zero in the Ramsey steady state regardless of the validity of the MGR. (ii) The optimal capital tax is positive only along the transition path, and it depends positively on the elasticity of intertemporal substitution. (iii) The optimal debt-to-GDP ratio, however, is determined by a positive wedge times the MGR saving rate. The key insight behind our results is that in the absence of any wealth-redistribution effects, taxing capital in the steady state cannot eliminate the liquidity premium—the primal friction in the model—but instead permanently erodes individuals' buffer-stock savings and self-insurance position; thus, the Ramsey planner opts to issue debt rather than impose a steady-state capital tax to correct the capital-overaccumulation problem whenever the interest rate lies below the time discount rate. Also, the MGR fails to hold in a Ramsey equilibrium whenever the government encounters a binding debt limit; but even in this case the optimal long-run capital tax is zero. Therefore, if there is a reason to tax capital in the Ramsey steady state, it may have something to do with the tax's effect on wealth redistribution rather than on the failure of the MGR due to capital overaccumulation.

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 effects of private precautionary saving on factor prices and taxes capital unless the weight on future generations in the social welfare function is sufficiently high. For logarithmic utility a complete analytical solution of the Ramsey problem exhibits an optimal aggregate saving rate that is independent of income risk, whereas the optimal time-invariant tax on capital implementing this saving rate is increasing in income risk. The optimal saving rate is constant along the transition and its sign depends on the magnitude 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 induces a Pareto-improving transition even if the initial equilibrium capital stock is below the golden rule.

Optimal Taxation of Capital in the Presence of Declining Labor Share

We analyze the implications of the decline in labor’s share in national income for optimal Ramsey taxation. It is optimal to accompany the decline in labor share by raising capital taxes only if the labor share is falling because of a decline in competition or other mechanisms that raise the share of pure profits. This result holds under various alternative institutional arrangements that are relevant for optimal taxation of capital income. A quantitative application to the U.S. economy shows that soaring profit shares since the 1980's can justify a significantly increasing path of capital income taxes.

Ramsey Taxation in the Solow-Uzawa Growth Model with Public Goods

This paper examines issues related to optimal taxation similar to those addressed by Ramsey in his celebrated 1927 paper. Rather than determining taxes on commodities with given revenue to minimize the decrement of utility may be minimum in the Ramsey approach, this model determines optimal taxation to maximize utility with revenue as endogenous variable. We analyze optimal taxation in neoclassical growth theory. We introduce a public sector to the Solow-Uzawa neoclassical growth model. The economy is composed of the public, capital goods and consumer goods sectors. Public goods enter into the utility function. The public sector is financially supported by the government’s revenue from taxing consumption of capital goods and consumer goods. We derive the optimal taxation rule and construct the dynamics of the national economy. The model describes nonlinear dynamic interactions among national and sectoral growth, economic structural change, wealth/capital accumulation, and optimal tax rates in perfect competitive markets with the government intervention. We carry out comparative analysis to analyze effects of changes in some parameters on the tax rates and other economic variables.

Do we need ramsey taxation? Our existing taxes are largely corrective

Due to the importance of environmental disruption (both in production and consumption), relative competition between individuals (including conspicuous consumption and keeping up with the Joneses), the diamond effect, excessive consumerism or the materialist bias, most taxes in most countries, though mainly designed for revenue collection, are largely corrective than distortive. There is thus no need for Ramsey taxation. In this paper, a theoretical model is built to make a comparison between the social optimality attained by an income tax and the individual optimality attained without an income tax. Relative competition and environmental disruption reinforce each other in causing excessive work and excessive pollution. An income tax is shown to reduce these double departures (from social optimality) of both leisure and environmental quality. The empirical test conducted on the data from the World Bank and the International Labor Organization conforms to this theoretical finding. More concretely, when the labor tax increases by 1 standard deviation from the average level, the average working time may be reduced by 1.125%. And when there is a higher profit tax than the average level by 1 standard deviation, about 6% of the cross-country average level of carbon damage in the sample may be reduced.

The timing of optimal capital income tax reforms: the role of intangible capital investment

This paper studies the role of intangible capital investment in the timing of optimal capital income tax reforms. Within an infinitely lived worker–capitalist model as in Judd (J Public Econ 28:59–83, 1985), we consider two different economies: one in which capitalists devote physical investment, management time and intangible capital investment to build capital; and a second one in which capitalists do not need to devote intangible capital investment. We perform a Pareto-improving Ramsey tax reform and compare the optimal paths of corporate and dividend taxes during the transition with and without intangible capital. Without intangible investment, optimal corporate income taxes are set at 100% for 10 years and then fall to 0%, while optimal dividend taxes are set to 78% initially and follow a steep decline to 37% over 10 years. With intangible investment, optimal corporate income taxes are set to − 20% initially and slowly converge toward zero, while dividend income taxes are set to 61% initially and follow a slow decline to 27% over 50 years.

Optimal Ramsey taxation with endogenous risk aversion

In this paper, we study optimal Ramsey taxation under endogenous risk aversion formulation in an otherwise standard real business cycle economy. We show that when the risk aversion coefficient co-moves counter-cyclically, the canonical Chamley–Judd (Chamley, 1986; Judd, 1985) result does not hold true, and the Ramsey planner chooses a positive capital income tax rate in the long run. We report that result is due to additional wedges both in the intratemporal and the intertemporal optimality condition of the representative household.

The Optimum Quantity of Capital and Debt

In this paper we solve the dynamic optimal Ramsey taxation problem in a model with incomplete markets, where the government commits itself ex-ante to a time path of labor taxes, capital taxes and debt to maximize the discounted sum of agents’ utility starting from today. Whereas the literature has bee limited mainly to studying policies that maximize steady-state welfare only, we instead characterize the optimal policy along the full transition path. We show theoretically that in the long run the capital stock satisfies the modified golden rule. More importantly, we prove that in contrast to complete markets economies, in incomplete markets economies the long run steady-state resulting from an infinite sequence of optimal policy choices is independent of initial conditions. This result is not only of theoretical interest but moreover, enables us to compute the long-run optimum independently from the transition path such that a quantitative analysis becomes tractable. Quantitatively we find, robustly across various calibrations, that in the long run the government debt-to-GDP ratio is high, capital is taxed at a low rate and labor income at a high rate when compared to current U.S. values. Along the optimal transition to the steady state, labor taxes initially are lowered, financed through issuing more debt and taxing capital income heavily, before they are eventually increased to their steady-state level.

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.

Restoring Ramsey tax lessons to Mirrleesian tax settings: Atkinson–Stiglitz and Ramsey reconciled

This paper restores many of the Ramsey tax/pricing lessons perceived as outdated in the optimal tax literature following the Atkinson and Stiglitz (J Public Econ 6:55–75, 1976) framework wherein differential commodity taxes are considered to be redundant. The key to our findings is the incorporation of a “break-even constraint” for public firms into the Atkinson and Stiglitz framework. Break-even constraints are fundamental to the regulatory pricing literature but have somehow been overlooked in the optimal tax literature. Incorporating them reconciles the optimal-tax and the regulatory-pricing views on Ramsey tax/pricing rules.

Optimal Ramsey Capital Taxation with Endogenous Government Spending

The authors study optimal capital income taxation in heterogeneous agent economies featuring endogenous government spending. Similar to Aiyagari (1995), they find that the long-run optimal capital tax rate should not be zero as long as the competitive equilibrium risk-free interest rate differs from the subjective time discount rate. The authors first argue that this result holds in a wide range of economic environments and is not limited to only the standard incomplete market model with heterogeneous agents. As an example, a decentralized economy with limited commitment is considered. Second, they show that this result critically depends on the assumption of endogenous government spending. Within the same limited commitment environment, they show that the long-run capital taxation becomes zero with exogenous government spending. The authors conclude that the optimal Ramsey taxation in heterogeneous agent economies with exogenous government spending and various frictions is still an open question.

Optimal Fiscal Policy with Endogenous Time Preference

This paper studies the role of Ramsey taxation under the assumption that the individual rate of time preference is determined by the publicly provided social level of education. We show how intertemporal complementarities of aggregate human capital can generate multiple equilibria and we examine the role of endogenous fiscal policies in equilibrium selection. Our analysis implies a lower optimal government size due to the effect of human capital on time preference.

Fiscal policy in debt constrained economies

We study optimal fiscal policy in a small open economy (SOE) with sovereign and private default risk and limited commitment to tax plans. The SOE's government uses linear taxation to fund exogenous expenditures and uses public debt to inter-temporally allocate tax distortions. We characterize a class of environments in which the tax on labor goes to zero in the long run, while the tax on capital income may be non-zero, reversing the standard prediction of the Ramsey tax literature. The zero labor tax is an optimal long run outcome if the economy is subject to sovereign debt constraints and the domestic households are impatient relative to the international interest rate. The front loading of tax distortions allows the economy to build a large (aggregate) debt position in the presence of limited commitment. We show that a similar result holds in a closed economy with imperfect inter-generational altruism, providing a link with the closed-economy literature that has explored disagreement between the government and its citizens regarding inter-temporal tradeoffs.

Optimal Ramsey taxation with hidden actions

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to study the problem of optimal Ramsey taxation in a finite-planning-horizon, representative-agent endogenous growth model including government expenditures as a productive input in capital formation and also with hidden actions. Design/methodology/approach – Technically, Malliavin calculus and forward integrals are naturally introduced into the macroeconomic theory when economic agents are faced with different information structures arising from a non-Markovian environment. Findings – The major result shows that the well-known Judd-Chamley Theorem holds almost surely if the depreciation rate is strictly positive, otherwise Judd-Chamley Theorem only holds for a knife-edge case or on a Lebesgue measure-zero set when the physical capital is completely sustainable. Originality/value – The author believes that the approach developed as well as the major result established is new and relevant.