How Should Tax Progressivity Respond to Rising Income Inequality?

Jonathan Heathcote, Kjetil Storesletten and Giovanni Violante

No 28006, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We address this question in a heterogeneous-agent incomplete-markets model featuring exogenous idiosyncratic risk, endogenous skill investment, and flexible labor supply. The tax and transfer schedule is restricted to be log-linear in income, a good description of the US system. Rising inequality is modeled as a combination of skill-biased technical change and growth in residual wage dispersion. When facing shifts in the income distribution like those observed in the US, a utilitarian planner chooses higher progressivity in response to larger residual inequality but lower progressivity in response to widening skill price dispersion reflecting technical change. Overall, optimal progressivity is approximately unchanged between 1980 and 2016. We document that the progressivity of the actual US tax and transfer system has similarly changed little since 1980, in line with the model prescription.

JEL-codes: E24 H21 J24 J3 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma, nep-mac and nep-ore
Note: EFG PE
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Published as Jonathan Heathcote & Kjetil Storesletten & Giovanni L Violante, 2020. "How Should Tax Progressivity Respond to Rising Income Inequality?," Journal of the European Economic Association, vol 18(6), pages 2715-2754.

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Working Paper: How Should Tax Progressivity Respond to Rising Income Inequality (2020)
Working Paper: How Should Tax Progressivity Respond to Rising Income Inequality? (2020)
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