On the shape of optimal tax schedule

Research output: Journal PublicationsJournal Article (refereed)peer-review

185 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Take consumers to be described by a parameter h (skill, needs, etc.) with utilities defined on N commodities, including factor supplies. Our main result is that if in the optimum each component of this consumption vector is bounded and bounded away from zero over the population, each marginal tax must be zero at both ends of the corresponding tax schedule. For the income tax case, it is also shown that if the marginal tax rate at the top of the scale is positive, one can construct another tax schedule which is strongly Pareto superior (dominating the first one at all or most income levels), requirements of information being low.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)203-235
Number of pages33
JournalJournal of Public Economics
Volume7
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 1977
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

This paper is part of a D.Phil. thesis (Oxford), for which Professor J.A. Mirrlees provided most helpful supervision. My special thanks are due to him. I am also indebted to Professor A.B. Atkinson, J.S. Flemming, who also supervised part of my work, and Dr. N.H. Stern, for very valuable suggestions, as well as to the members of seminars at Maryland, Warwick and Nuffield College, Oxford for their useful comments. The paper was presented at the 1976 European Meeting of the Econometric Society (Helsinki). Financial support from the Ford Foundation is gratefully acknowledged, as is assistance from CONACYT (Mexico).

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