Redistribution with Performance Pay

Pawel Doligalski, Abdoulaye Ndiaye and Nicolas Werquin

No 8267, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Half of the jobs in the U.S. feature pay-for-performance. We study nonlinear income taxation in a model where such contracts arise in private labor markets that are constrained by moral hazard frictions. We derive novel formulas for the incidence of arbitrarily nonlinear reforms of a given tax code on both the mean of earnings and their sensitivity to performance. We show theoretically and quantitatively that, following an increase in tax progressivity, the higher performance-sensitivity caused by the crowding-out of insurance provided by firms is almost fully offset by a countervailing “performance-pay effect” driven by labor supply responses. As a result, earnings risk is hardly affected by policy. We then turn to the normative analysis of a government that levies taxes and transfers to redistribute income across workers with different levels of uninsurable productivity. We find that setting taxes without accounting for the endogeneity of private insurance is close to optimal. Thus, the common concern that standard models of taxation underestimate the cost of redistribution is, in the context of performance-based compensation, overblown.

Keywords: tax incidence; optimal taxation; moral hazard; performance pay (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D61 D82 D86 H21 H22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hrm, nep-ias and nep-pbe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Redistribution with Performance Pay (2023)
Working Paper: Redistribution with Performance Pay (2022)
Working Paper: Redistribution with Performance Pay (2020)
Working Paper: Redistribution with Performance Pay (2020)
Working Paper: Redistribution with Performance Pay (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_8267

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