Majority Rule and Selfishly Optimal Nonlinear Income Tax Schedules with Discrete Skill Levels

Craig Brett and John Weymark

No 17-00015, Vanderbilt University Department of Economics Working Papers from Vanderbilt University Department of Economics

Abstract: Röell (unpublished, 2012) shows that Black's Median Voter Theorem for majority voting with single-peaked preferences applies to voting over nonlinear income tax schedules that satisfy the constraints of a finite type version of the Mirrlees optimal income tax problem when voting takes place over the tax schedules that are selfishly optimal for some individual and preferences are quasilinear. An alternative way of establishing Röell's median voter result is provided that offers a different perspective on her findings, drawing on insights obtained by Brett and Weymark (GEB, 2017) in their analysis of a version of this problem with a continuum of types. In order to characterize a selfishly optimal schedule, it is determined how to optimally bunch different types of individuals.

Keywords: nonlinear income taxation; political economy of taxation; optimal bunching; redistributive taxation; voting over tax schedules (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D7 H2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-11-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-pbe and nep-pol
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Majority rule and selfishly optimal nonlinear income tax schedules with discrete skill levels (2020)
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