Voting over selfishly optimal nonlinear income tax schedules with a minimum-utility constraint

Craig Brett and John Weymark

Journal of Mathematical Economics, 2016, vol. 67, issue C, 18-31

Abstract: Pairwise majority voting over alternative nonlinear income tax schedules is considered when there is a continuum of individuals who differ in their labor productivities, which is private information, but share the same quasilinear-in-consumption preferences for labor and consumption. Voting is restricted to those schedules that are selfishly optimal for some individual. The analysis extends that of Brett and Weymark (2016) by adding a minimum-utility constraint to their incentive-compatibility and government budget constraints. It also extends the analysis of Röell (2012) and Bohn and Stuart (2013) by providing a complete characterization of the selfishly optimal tax schedules. It is shown that individuals have single-peaked preferences over the set of selfishly optimal tax schedules, and so the schedule proposed by the median skill type is a Condorcet winner.

Keywords: Mirrlees tax problem; Nonlinear income taxation; Political economy of taxation; Redistributive taxation; Voting over tax schedules (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304406816301197
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Voting over Selfishly Optimal Nonlinear Income Tax Schedules with a Minimum-Utility Constraint (2016)
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:mateco:v:67:y:2016:i:c:p:18-31

DOI: 10.1016/j.jmateco.2016.09.001

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Mathematical Economics is currently edited by Atsushi (A.) Kajii

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