Insurance and Redistribution with Simple Tax Instruments

Dominik Sachs and Sebastian Findeisen

VfS Annual Conference 2015 (Muenster): Economic Development - Theory and Policy from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association

Abstract: We study optimal nonlinear taxation of labor income and linear taxation of capital income in a life-cycle framework with private information and idiosyncratic risk. We focus on simple history-independent tax instruments. We first analyze the welfare losses from this simplification as compared to optimal history-dependent policies. We find very small losses from restricting the complexity of savings wedges. Eliminating history dependence of labor wedges leads to larger welfare losses: moving from history dependence to age dependence yields approximately the same welfare losses as moving from age dependence to age independence and from nonlinear to linear income taxation. For optimal history- independent taxes, we provide a novel decomposition into a redistribution and an insurance component and a generalization of the top tax formula to dynamic environments. Capital taxation is desirable and yields sizable welfare gains, especially if labor income taxes are set below their optimal level.

JEL-codes: H20 H21 H23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge, nep-ias and nep-pbe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:vfsc15:113099

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