re examination of uniform commodity taxes under a non linear income tax system and its implication for production efficiency abstract this paper shows that the result of uniform commodity tax under nonlinear income taxation by atkinson and stiglitz 1976 no longer holds if the production side of an economy is taken into the consideration in particular imposing a non uniform commodity tax can pareto improve welfare even under nonlinear income taxation in addition the paper shows that if the government uses a nonlinear income tax system for income redistribution then the introduction of distortions in the public sector can pareto improve welfare contrary to the results in diamond and mirrlees 1971

on the undesirability of commodity taxation even when income taxation is not optimal abstract an important result due to atkinson and stiglitz 1976 atkinson a b stiglitz j e 1976 the design of tax structure direct versus indirect taxation journal of public economics 6 55 75 is that differential commodity taxation is not optimal in the presence of an optimal nonlinear income tax given weak separability of utility between labor and all consumption goods this article demonstrates that this conclusion holds regardless of whether the income tax is optimal in particular given any commodity tax and income tax system differential commodity taxation can be eliminated in a manner that results in a pareto improvement also differential commodity taxation can be proportionally reduced so as to generate a pareto improvement in addition for commodity tax reforms that neither eliminate nor proportionally reduce differential taxation a simple efficiency condition is offered for determining whether a pareto improvement is possible

regressive sin taxes with an application to the optimal soda tax a common objection to sin taxes corrective taxes on goods that are thought to be overconsumed such as cigarettes alcohol and sugary drinks is that they often fall disproportionately on low income consumers this paper studies the interaction between corrective and redistributive motives in a general optimal taxation framework and delivers empirically implementable formulas for sufficient statistics for the optimal commodity tax the optimal sin tax is increasing in the price elasticity of demand increasing in the degree to which lower income consumers are more biased or more elastic to the tax decreasing in the extent to which consumption is concentrated among the poor and decreasing in income effects because income effects imply that commodity taxes create labor supply distortions contrary to common intuitions stronger preferences for redistribution can increase the optimal sin tax if lower income consumers are more responsive to taxes or are more biased as an application we estimate the optimal nationwide tax on sugar sweetened beverages using nielsen homescan data and a specially designed survey measuring nutrition knowledge and self control holding federal income tax rates constant our estimates imply an optimal federal sugar sweetened beverage tax of 1 to 2 1 cents per ounce although optimal city level taxes could be as much as 60 lower due to cross border shopping

environmental taxation inequality and engel s law the double dividend of redistribution empirical evidence shows that low income households spend a high share of their income on pollution intensive goods this fuels the concern that an environmental tax reform could be regressive we employ a framework which accounts for the distributional effect of environmental taxes and the recycling of the revenues on both households and firms to quantify changes in the optimal tax structure and the equity impacts of an environmental tax reform we characterize when an optimal environmental tax reform does not increase inequality even if the tax system before the reform is optimal from a non environmental point of view if the tax system before the reform is calibrated to stylized data and is thus non optimal we find that there is a large scope for inequality reduction even if the government is restricted in its recycling options

taxing consumption and other sins taxes as their primary tools to collect revenue in the rest of the world governments also use income and payroll taxes but rely much more heavily than does the united states on taxing consumption consumption taxes take many forms including general sales taxes value added taxes and excise taxes on the consumption of specific items including gasoline alcohol tobacco products firearms air travel telephone communication and others the u s government does not use a value added tax making the united states unique among high income countries and a rarity in the larger world as of 2004 at least 134 countries rely on value added taxes as a substantial source of funding value added taxes are sophisticated forms of sales taxes in which taxes are withheld by businesses according to value added at every stage of production american states do impose sales taxes on broad categories of consumer purchases but state governments are considerably smaller than national governments and their sales tax rates are very low compared to the value added tax rates used in the rest of the world the united states also imposes unusually low excise taxes even after controlling for total tax collections which are lower in the united states than they are in most high income countries the deliberate social engineering that underlies the selection of certain commodities for unusually high rates of taxation appeals less to americans than to residents of other countries moreover the sin taxes on

optimal taxation and cross price effects on labor supply estimates of the optimal gas tax abstract this study estimates parameters necessary to calculate the optimal second best gasoline tax most notably the cross price elasticity between gasoline and leisure prior theoretical work indicates the importance of this elasticity but despite this almost none of the prior studies of commodity taxation and none of the studies on second best environmental regulation actually estimate it using household data we find that gasoline is a relative complement to leisure and thus that the optimal gasoline tax is significantly higher than marginal damages the opposite of the result suggested by the bulk of the prior literature indeed even if there were no externalities at all associated with gasoline the optimal tax rate would still be almost equal to the average gas tax rate in the u s following this approach to estimate cross price elasticities with leisure could strongly influence estimates of optimal rates for other important commodity or pollution taxes

a new method of estimating risk aversion i show existing evidence on labor supply behavior places an upper bound on risk aversion in the expected utility model i derive a formula for the coefficient of relative risk aversion in terms of the ratio of the income elasticity of labor supply to wage elasticity and degree of complementarity between consumption and labor i bound the degree of complementarity using data on consumption choices when labor supply varies across states using labor supply elasticity estimates i find a mean estimate of 1 then show generating 2 requires that wage increases cause sharper labor supply reductions jel d81 j22

indirect taxation is superfluous under separability and taste homogeneity a simple proof indirect taxation is of no use when nonlinear income taxation is available in an economy where everyone has the same taste for goods an elementary proof of this result due to atkinson and stiglitz atkinson a stiglitz j 1976 the design of tax structure direct versus indirect taxation journal of public economics 6 55 75 is provided

optimal redistribution when different workers are indistinguishable using the standard non linear income and commodity taxation framework this paper examines the optimal policy to be adopted when the same labor disutility can receive two opposite interpretations taste for leisure and activity limitation in the absence of complete information about individual characteristics an income tax does not allow to distinguish lazy from handicapped individuals one may however rely on a combination of commodity and income taxes to redistribute from the former to the latter when they differ in their preferences for commodities

a study of bank efficiency taking into account risk preferences abstract i use the stochastic cost frontier approach to investigate efficiency of banks operating in the third federal reserve district accounting for the quality and riskiness of bank output in addition to the mean and mode of the conditional distribution of the one sided error term i calculate confidence intervals for the inefficiency measures based on the conditional distribution the results indicate that third district banks are operating at cost efficient output levels and product mixes but are not efficiently using their inputs the second part of the article relates the inefficiency measures to several correlates

the marginal cost of raising tax revenue and redistributing income we present analytic formulas for calculating marginal welfare costs when taxes are levied against the wages of a heterogeneous population of households and marginal tax revenue finances either the supply of a public good or lump sum transfers the formulas are applied to explain the wide discrepancy between estimates of marginal welfare costs for redistribution previously obtained through computer simulation procedures our calculations reveal that these procedures introduced lump sum transfers that were not specified as part of the reforms to be simulated but explain most of the differences between their estimates we also show that welfare cost estimates are quite sensitive to the elasticity of labor supply with respect to exhaustive public spending

traditional and nontraditional banking an information theoretic approach abstract this paper uses a multiproduct approach to analyze the costs of a sample of large banks where bank outputs are measured to account for the different types of information produced by banks diseconomies of scope are found between traditional banking activities of originating and monitoring loans and nontraditional activities of loan selling and buying this suggests maintaining fire walls between commercial bank functions and investment bank functions after the glass steagall act is repealed will not sacrifice joint production economies it also suggests that arguments for repeal of the act based on the existence of such economies are ill founded

optimal control of externalities in the presence of income taxation a substantial literature examines second best environmental policy focusing particularly on how the pigouvian directive that marginal taxes should equal marginal external harms needs to be modified in light of the preexisting distortion due to labor income taxation additional literature is motivated by the possibility that distributive concerns should amend the internalization prescription it is demonstrated however that simple first best rules unmodified for labor supply distortion or distribution are correct in a natural basic formulation of the problem specifically setting all commodity taxes equal to marginal harms and subsidies equal to marginal benefits can generate a pareto improvement likewise a marginal reform in the direction of the first best can yield a pareto improvement qualifications and explanations for differences from previous work are also presented

how to make a carbon tax reform progressive the role of subsistence consumption this letter analyzes the distributional effects of a carbon tax reform when households must consume carbon intensive goods above a subsistence level the reform is progressive if revenues are recycled as uniform lump sum transfers in other cases it is regressive

output and attribute based carbon regulation under uncertainty abstract output based carbon regulations such as fuel economy standards and the rate based standards in the clean power plan create well known incentives to inefficiently increase output similar distortions are created by attribute based regulations this paper demonstrates that despite these distortions output and attribute based standards can always yield strictly greater expected welfare than flat emission standards given uncertainty in demand for output or attributes assuming locally constant marginal damages for fuel economy standards the welfare maximizing amount of attribute or mileage basing is likely small relative to current policy for the electricity sector however an intensity standard may yield greater expected welfare than a flat standard

externalities and optimal taxation this paper reexamines the optimal tax design problem income and commodities in the presence of externalities the nature of the second best and the choice of the tax instruments are motivated by the informational structure in the economy the main results are i environmental levies linear or nonlinear differ in formula from pigouvian taxes by the expressions for the optimal tax on private goods ii externalities do not affect commodity tax formulas linear and nonlinear for private goods iii externalities do not affect the income tax structure if commodity taxes are nonlinear and affect it if commodity taxes are linear and iv a general income tax plus strictly pigouvian taxes are sufficient for efficient taxation if individuals of different types have identical marginal rates of substitution at any given consumption bundle

direct versus indirect taxation the design of the tax structure revisited this article studies the optimal direct indirect tax mix problem when individuals differ in several unobservable characteristics productivity and endowments it presents general expressions for the optimal commodity tax rates and proves that contrary to atkinson and stiglitz s 1976 result differential commodity taxation remains a useful instrument of tax policy even if preferences are separable between labor and produced goods when cross substitution effects are zero the expressions resemble traditional many households ramsey rules in a cobb douglas illustration where endowments differ only in good 1 interpreted as wealth the tax on good 2 provides an indirect way to tax the unobservable wealth

measuring efficiency at u s banks accounting for heterogeneity is important abstract estimates of bank cost efficiency can be biased if bank heterogeneity is ignored i compare x inefficiency derived from a model constraining the cost frontier to be the same for all banks in the u s and a model allowing for different frontiers and error terms across federal reserve districts i find that the data reject the single cost function model x inefficiency measures based on the single cost function model are on average higher than those based on the separate cost functions model the distributions of the one sided error terms are wider for the single cost function model than for the separate cost functions model and the ranking of districts by the level of x inefficiency differs in the two models the results suggest it is important when studying x inefficiency to account for differences across the markets in which banks are operating and that since x inefficiency is by construction a residual it will be particulary sensitive to omissions in the basic model

the desirability of commodity taxation under non linear income taxation and heterogeneous tastes abstract this paper revisits the atkinson stiglitz result on uselessness of commodity taxation in the presence of optimal non linear income taxation in a more general setup namely when tastes are heterogeneous this general analysis displays the key economic assumptions under which the atkinson stiglitz result is robust a small tax on a given commodity is desirable if high income earners have a relatively higher taste for this commodity or if consumption of this commodity increases with leisure an application to the case of savings suggests that even in the presence of optimal non linear earnings taxation there is a role for a supplemental capital income tax in the standard overlapping generation model

an examination of cost subadditivity and multiproduct production in large u s banks this paper examines the subadditivity of costs for a sample of the largest commercial banks in the u s we introduce into the bank production literature the grid approach developed by evans and heckman 1984 we estimate two models of the bank cost function one where deposits are treated as outputs while in the other deposits are treated as inputs the models are estimated using the commonly used translog and the more flexible miniflex laurent viewed narrowly the findings imply that cost complementarities are not the raison d etre for multiproduct production in the largest commercial banks subadditive costs however are sufficient but not necessary for multiproduct production it is quite possible for multiproduct production to be optimal when output are produced independently levy and haber 1986 and teece 1980 1982 it is only required that inputs be shareable as opposed to joint copyright 1990 by ohio state university press

should the good and the selfish be taxed differently in this paper we consider an environment where individual actions have externalities and two types of agents exist agents with social preferences the good and selfish agents selfish agents have pay off functions that do not take into account social welfare the pay off of an agent is a linear combination of social welfare and the pay off of a selfish agent we demonstrate that the corrective tax rates that maximize social welfare do not depend on the degree of social preferences hence the good and the selfish should not be taxed differently

optimal dynamic carbon taxes in a climate economy model with distortionary fiscal policy how should carbon be taxed as a part of fiscal policy the literature on optimal carbon pricing often abstracts from other taxes however when governments raise revenues with distortionary taxes carbon levies have fiscal impacts while they raise revenues directly they may shrink the bases of other taxes e g by decreasing employment this article theoretically characterizes and then quantifies optimal carbon taxes in a dynamic general equilibrium climate economy model with distortionary fiscal policy first this article establishes a novel theoretical relationship between the optimal taxation of carbon and of capital income this link arises because carbon emissions destroy natural capital they accumulate in the atmosphere and decrease future output consequently this article shows how the standard logic against capital income taxes extends to distortions on environmental capital investments second this article characterizes optimal climate policy in sub optimal fiscal settings where income taxes are constrained to remain at their observed levels third this article presents a detailed calibration that builds on the seminal dice approach but adds features essential for a setting with distortionary taxes such as a differentiation between climate change production impacts e g on agriculture and direct utility impacts e g on biodiversity existence value the central quantitative finding is that optimal carbon tax schedules are 8 24 lower when there are distortionary taxes compared to the setting with lump sum taxes considered in the literature

on the ir relevance of distribution and labor supply distortion to government policy should the assessment of government policies such as the provision of public goods and the control of externalities deviate from first best principles to account for distributive effects and the distortionary cost of labor income taxation for example is the optimal extent of public goods provision smaller than indicated by the samuelson rule because finance is distortionary or should environmental regulations fail to internalize externalities fully if the incidence of the regulations is regressive it is suggested that these questions are best addressed by considering distribution neutral implementation in which budget balance is achieved by choosing an adjustment to the income tax that offsets the distributive impact of the policy in question in basic cases both distribution and labor supply distortion are moot because the target policy and the tax adjustment produce offsetting effects on each thus traditional first best principles provide good benchmarks for policy analysis after all moreover even when actual implementation will not be distribution neutral in aggregate distribution neutral policy analysis has many conceptual and practical virtues that render it quite useful to investigators

minimum wage policy with optimal taxes and unemployment abstract using a search model i derive a formula that links the welfare gains from the minimum wage to its effect on low skilled labor force participation and employment this formula shows that the minimum wage is welfare improving if pushing the low skilled labor market tightness downwards brings it closer to its efficient level i estimate the causal effect of the minimum wage on low skilled labor force participation and employment using federal and state minimum wage variation i discuss the policy implications of my estimates when viewed through the lens of the marginal welfare gain formula

when environmental and redistribution concerns collide the case of electricity pricing abstract countries worldwide face major income inequality and environmental challenges however recent social upheavals reveal the conflict of interests induced by policies designed to address these concerns one example relates to residential electricity where volumetric grid charges and taxes may impede the affordability of electricity we develop and calibrate a model that captures the social planner s trade off between inequality aversion and environmental concerns we employ panel data on 105 000 households in the swiss canton of bern from 2008 to 2013 including electricity consumption household income and tax payment characteristics the results show that with inequity aversion and no negative environmental externalities electricity consumption should be subsidised by income tax revenue with negative environmental externalities or asymmetric information between the government and the utility end user electricity prices are shifted upwards for high degrees of inequality aversion the optimal electricity end user price is below the marginal cost even in the presence of negative environmental externalities

the health influence on returns to education in brazil a nonlinear approach abstract this paper investigates the returns to education in terms of individuals health in brazil we use the heckman procedure 1979 and a nonlinear model that allows the consideration of the existence of increasing returns the study employs microdata from national survey by household sample for 2003 and 2008 the health status is measured by self assessment of individuals we determine that the rate of returns decreases until the fourth and fifth years of schooling that is until the completion of primary education when increasing returns start the evidence also indicates that the rate of return to education is lower for individuals in poor health for people with 15 or more years of schooling the rate of return is 10 14 5 lower for those who are unhealthy

in praise of frank ramsey s contribution to the theory of taxation frank ramsey s brilliant 1927 paper modestly entitled a contribution to the theory of taxation is a landmark in the economics of public finance nearly a half century later through the work of diamond and mirrlees 1971 and mirrlees 1971 his paper can be thought of as launching the field of optimal taxation and revolutionising public finance ramsey f p 1927 a contribution to the theory of taxation economic journal vol 37 145 pp 47 61

redistribution and pollution taxes with non linear engel curves abstract this paper analyses optimal corrective taxation and optimal income redistribution the pigouvian pollution tax is higher if pollution damages disproportionally hurt the poor due to equity weighting of pollution damages moreover under general utility functions optimal pollution taxes should be set below the pigouvian tax if the poor spend a disproportionate fraction of their income on polluting goods however if engel curves are linear optimal pollution taxes should follow the first best rule for the pigouvian corrective tax even if the government wants to redistribute income and the poor spend a disproportional part of their income on polluting goods the often used quasi linear ces and stone geary utility functions all have linear engel curves if engel curves are linear and if pollution taxes are not optimised pareto improving green tax reforms exist that move the pollution tax closer to the pigouvian tax simulations demonstrate that optimal corrective taxes should be pigouvian if the demand for polluting goods is derived from a les demand system but deviate from the pigouvian taxes if demand for polluting goods demand is derived from a piglog demand system

distributional effects of alternative vehicle pollution control policies abstract previous work shows that policies that subsidize new vehicles and tax size miles or gasoline efficiently reduce pollution less is known about their distributional effects this paper examines distributional effects by estimating the joint demand for vehicles and miles using the consumer expenditure survey greater price responsiveness among low income households enhances progressivity of gas or miles taxes across lower incomes and mitigates regressivity across upper incomes taxes on engine size or subsidies to new vehicles are significantly more regressive than gas or miles taxes

the marginal efficiency effects of taxes and subsidies in the presence of externalities a computational general equilibrium approach abstract using 1983 data we develop a 19 sector computational general equilibrium model incorporating producer producer externalities and producer consumer externalities simulation results indicate that when additional government expenditure is financed by pigouvian taxes the marginal cost of public funds is substantially below one labor sales and output taxes also affect the output of the polluting industries and thus have indirect pigouvian effects which tend to reduce the associated marginal costs of public funds pigouvian taxes are usually more efficient than pigouvian subsidies since the tax revenue can be used to reduce other taxes

taxing externalities under financing constraints we consider an economy where production generates externalities which can be reduced by additional firm level expenditures this requires firms to raise outside financing leading to deadweight loss due to a standard agency problem vis a vis outside investors policy is constrained as firms are privately informed about their marginal cost of avoiding externalities we first derive the optimal linear pollution tax which is strictly lower than the pigouvian tax for two reasons first higher firm outside financing creates additional deadweight loss second through redistributing resources in the economy a higher tax reduces average productive efficiency we analyze various instruments that achieve a more efficient allocation in particular nonlinear pollution taxes which can no longer be implemented through a tradable permit scheme alone and grants tied to loans which are frequently observed in practice