The French National Research Agency selected the MIDDLECLASS project I coordinate for a 48-month grant. The team of economits @GATE – ENS DE LYON will collaborate with #Aix Marseille School of Economics and #CREST-Ecole Polytechnique. Looking forward to keeping you posted on our progress and findings!
Tag: redistribution
Income Shifting as Income Creation?
My joint paper with H. Selin (IFAU) has just been accepted for publication in the Journal of Public Economics.
It addresses income shifting – one of the key questions when thinking about the design of a tax system as a whole. We study a simple economy, involving a benevolent policy-maker and a population of agents differing in terms of productivities, labor supply elasticities, and shifting costs. Paying special attention to the cost structure of income shifting, we highlight that when people who shift easily along the extensive margin are also more elastic in labor supply, giving them a lower tax rate is a good thing, and the government should not necessarily combat income shifting. This mechanism may be compared to third-degree price discrimination in industrial organization and works as a form of endogenous tagging. We explore this possibility numerically before showing that our results derived for a policy-maker optimally adjusting two linear tax instruments carry over when two fully non-linear taxes are potentially available.
Lecture on: “How to redistribute income and wealth in the 21st Century?”
Marginal Deadweight Loss when the Income Tax is Nonlinear
My article “Marginal Deadweight Loss when the Income Tax is Nonlinear” joint with Sören Blomquist has been published in the Journal of Econometrics.
Most theoretical work on how to calculate the marginal deadweight loss has been done for linear taxes and for variations in linear budget constraints. This is quite surprising because most income tax systems are nonlinear, generating nonlinear budget constraints. Instead of developing the proper procedure to calculate the marginal deadweight loss for variations in nonlinear income taxes, a common procedure has been to linearize the nonlinear budget constraint and apply methods that are correct for variations in a linear income tax. Such a procedure leads to incorrect results. The main purpose of this paper is to show how to correctly calculate the marginal deadweight loss when the income tax is nonlinear. A second purpose is to evaluate the bias in results that obtains when a linearization procedure is used. Our main theoretical result is that the overall curvature of the tax system plays the same role as the curvature of indifference curves for the size of the marginal deadweight loss. Using numerical simulations calibrated on US data, we show that common linearization procedures may lead to substantial overestimation of the marginal deadweight loss.
Re-Thinking Inequality Fight – In French @Le Monde
Taxing and Redistributing Locally in a Globalized World @Jéco 2016
“Comment taxer et dépenser localement au XXIème siècle ?” In this lecture, I explain the challenges faced by current policies and introduce the tools and key mechanisms citizens and governments should keep in mind when thinking about income and wealth redistribution through taxation at the local level. Click here for the video.
Laurent Simula 