Luca Micheletto

Age related optimal income taxation

In most countries, average income varies with age. In this paper we investigate if and how it is possible to enhance the redistributive mechanism by relating tax payments to age. Using an OLG model where some individuals are low skilled all their life while others are low skilled when young but high skilled when old, we first show how an age dependent optimal income tax can Pareto improve upon an age independent income tax. We then characterize the optimal age dependent income tax. A tax on interest income is part of the optimal tax structure.

The Welfare Gains Of Age‐Related Optimal Income Taxation

Using a calibrated overlapping generations model we quantify the welfare gains of an age dependent income tax. Agents face uncertainty regarding future abilities and can by saving transfer consumption across periods. The welfare gain of switching from an age-independent to an age-dependent nonlinear tax amounts in our benchmark model to around three percent of GDP. The gains are particularly high when there are restrictions on debt policy. The gains of using a nonlinear- as opposed to a linear tax are even larger. Surprisingly, it is of secondary importance to optimally choose the tax on interest income.

Public Provision of Private Goods, Tagging and Optimal Income Taxation with Heterogeneity in Needs

Previous literature has shown that public provision of private goods can be a welfare-enhancing device in second-best settings where governments pursue redistributive goals. However, three issues have so far been neglected. First, the case for supplementing an optimal nonlinear income tax with public provision of private goods has been made in models where agents differ only in terms of market ability. Second, the magnitude of the welfare gains achievable through public provision schemes has not been assessed. Third, the similarities/differences between public provision schemes and tagging schemes have not been thoroughly analyzed. Our purpose in this paper is therefore threefold: first, to extend previous contributions by incorporating in the theoretical analysis both heterogeneity in market ability and in the need for the publicly provided good; second, to perform numerical simulations to quantify the size of the potential welfare gains achievable by introducing a public provision scheme, and to characterize the conditions under which these welfare gains are sizeable; finally, to compare the welfare gains from public provision with the welfare gains from tagging.

Nonlinear Income Taxation and Matching Grants in a Federation with Decentralized In-Kind Transfers

We extend to a fiscal federalism setting the literature on redistributive in-kind transfers in the presence of nonlinear income taxation. Local governments have a cost advantage, motivating decentralization of the in-kind transfer. The cost structure varies across regions, and the central government cannot observe which region is which. We show that decentralized in-kind transfers can, in this setting, be an even more important instrument for relaxing self-selection constraints, thus, helping redistribution, than in single-government models. We characterize the optimal marginal tax rates and matching grants. The grants have a very different structure than the one derived in earlier studies.

Optimal Redistributive Policy with Endogenous Wages

Using the self-selection framework developed by Stiglitz (1982, 1987) and Stern (1982), the paper reconsiders the issue of the desirability of public provision of private goods in a simple two-class economy where wages are endogenous and the policymaker has access to what is commonly known as the mixed tax system, i.e., the tax structure consisting of a nonlinear income tax plus a set of linear commodity taxes.

Public Provision of Private Goods, Self‐Selection and Income Tax Avoidance

Several contributions in the optimal taxation literature have emphasized that, when individuals’ preferences are not separable between leisure and other goods, it is desirable to supplement a nonlinear income tax with public provision of private goods. Moreover, it has also been shown that the choice between a topping-up and an opting-out scheme depends on whether the publicly provided good is a complement or substitute with leisure, with opting-out (topping-up) being the preferred scheme for goods which are substitutes (complements)for labor. In this paper, using the self-selection approach to tax analysis, we revisit these results in the presence of tax avoidance, and investigate how public provision interacts with the agents’incentives to engage in tax avoidance. Three results are obtained. First, we show that tax dodging opportunities imply that non-separability between labor and other goods is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition to make public provision of private goods a welfare-enhancing policy instrument. Second, we show how tax dodging opportunities limit the scope for using topping-up provision schemes as a redistributive device. Finally, we show that, for most of the public provision schemes previously analyzed in the literature, being a welfare-enhancing policy instrument goes hand in hand with weakening the agents’incentives to shelter income from the tax authority. However, we also point out an important exception to this pattern.

Where Should the Elderly Live and Who Should Pay for Their Care

We consider a model with a population consisting of earners and retired persons; elderly care is publicly provided. There is one big city, where congestion effects and agglomeration forces are at work, and a number of small villages. We show how the externalities related to population mobility lead to an inefficient spatial distribution of earners and retirees, and we characterize the second-best solution. Decentralization of this solution in a fiscal federalism structure requires the use of taxes and subsidies proportional to the number of earners and retired persons living in the city and the villages.