Optimal Non-Linear Income Tax when Highly Skilled Individuals Vote with their Feet

Laurent Simula and Alain Trannoy

No 610, IDEP Working Papers from Institut d'economie publique (IDEP), Marseille, France

Abstract: This paper examines how allowing individuals to emigrate to pay lower taxes changes the optimal non-linear income tax scheme in a Mirrleesian economy. Type-dependent participation constraints are borrowed from contract theory. An individual emigrates if his domestic utility is less than his utility abroad net of migration costs, utilities and costs both depending on productivity. Three social criteria are distinguished according to the agents whose welfare matters. Mobility signi.cantly alters the closed-economy results qualitatively, but also quantitatively as verified by simulations. A curse of the middle-skilled occurs in the first-best. In the second-best, the middle-skilled can support the highest average tax rates and the marginal tax rates can be negative. Moreover, preventing emigration of the highly-skilled is not necessarily optimal.

Keywords: Optimal Taxation; Income Tax; Emigration; Participation Constraints (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D82 F22 H21 H31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 42 pages
Date: 2006-12-18, Revised 2006-12-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic, nep-pbe and nep-pub
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Working Paper: Optimal Non-Linear Income Tax when Highly Skilled Individuals Vote with their Feet (2006)
Working Paper: Optimal Non-Linear Income Tax when Highly Skilled Individuals Vote with their Feet (2006)
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