Optimal Taxation and Market Power

Jan Eeckhout, Chunyang Fu, Wenjian Li and Xi Weng

No 16011, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: Should optimal income taxation change when firms have market power? The recent rise of market power has led to an increase in income inequality and a deterioration in efficiency and welfare. We analyze how the planner can optimally set taxes on the labor income of workers and on the profits of entrepreneurs to induce a constrained efficient allocation. As our main theoretical contribution we obtain explicit analytical expressions for the optimal tax rate as a function of market power. Our results show that optimal taxation can substantially increase welfare, but also highlight the severe constraints that the Planner faces to correct the negative externality from market power, using the income tax as a Pigouvian instrument. Pigouvian taxes compete with Mirrleesian incentive concerns, which generally leads to opposing forces in profit tax design. Overall, in our numerical analysis, we find that market power tends to lower marginal tax rates on workers, whereas it increases the marginal tax rate on entrepreneurs.

Keywords: Optimal taxation; Optimal profit tax; market power; Market structure; Markups (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D3 D4 J41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-04
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP16011 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Optimal Taxation and Market Power (2026)
Working Paper: Optimal Taxation and Market Power (2021)
Working Paper: Optimal taxation and market power (2021)
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:cpr:ceprdp:16011

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP16011

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().