EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Tax Smoothing in Frictional Labor Markets

Sanjay Chugh and David Arseneau

No 202, 2009 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics

Abstract: We re-examine the optimality of tax smoothing from the point of view of frictional labor markets. Our central result is that whether or not this cornerstone optimal fiscal policy prescription carries over to an environment with labor market frictions depends crucially on the cyclical nature of labor force participation. If the participation rate is exogenous at business-cycle frequencies --- as is typically assumed in the literature --- we show it is not optimal to smooth tax rates on labor income in the face of business-cycle shocks. However, if households do optimize at the participation margin, then tax-smoothing is optimal despite the presence of matching frictions. To understand these results, we develop a concept of general-equilibrium efficiency in search-based environments, which builds on existing (partial-equilibrium) search-efficiency conditions. Using this concept, we develop a notion of search-based labor-market wedges that allows us to trace the source of the sharply-contrasting fiscal policy prescriptions to the value of adjusting participation rates. Our results demonstrate that policy prescriptions can be very sensitive to the cyclical nature of labor-force participation in search-based environments.

Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://red-files-public.s3.amazonaws.com/meetpapers/2009/paper_202.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Tax Smoothing in Frictional Labor Markets (2012) Downloads
Working Paper: Tax smoothing in frictional labor markets (2009) Downloads
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:red:sed009:202

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2009 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Society for Economic Dynamics Marina Azzimonti Department of Economics Stonybrook University 10 Nicolls Road Stonybrook NY 11790 USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christian Zimmermann ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-29
Handle: RePEc:red:sed009:202