Redistribution with labor market frictions

Carlos E. da Costa, Lucas J. Maestri and Marcelo R. Santos

Journal of Economic Theory, 2022, vol. 201, issue C

Abstract: We study distributive and insurance policies in frictional labor markets where workers are privately informed about their abilities. The combination of selection and moral hazard constraints demands the use of new tax instruments that are redundant in frictionless labor markets to target vacancy creation. We characterize efficient allocations and derive new optimality conditions on effort and employment probability wedges. Wedges on both effort and vacancy creation are always positive at the bottom of the income distribution. For strong enough distributive motives, the same is true for all but the most productive agents. We devise a method for the quantitative assessment of inefficiencies, calibrate our model to the U.S. economy, and find that it is possible to increase government revenues by 3.48% while preserving everyone's utility.

Keywords: Mirrlees' problem; Directed search (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D82 H21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022053122000102
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jetheo:v:201:y:2022:i:c:s0022053122000102

DOI: 10.1016/j.jet.2022.105420

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Theory is currently edited by A. Lizzeri and K. Shell

More articles in Journal of Economic Theory from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().