演講者簡介 : Professor Chu received his Ph.D. in Economics from University of Michigan at 1985. He is currently a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Institute of Economics, Academia Sinica. His research fields are Population Economics, Law and Economics, Public Economics and Regional Economics.
演講摘要 : The invisible hand of the market is largely absent in guiding the allocation of parental bequeathed capital among children. Previous studies on inheritance tax such as Piketty and Saez (2013) assume away this possible misallocation, since they are mostly built on the perfect-capital-market premise under which bequeathed capital all receives a common rate of returns. This paper counts in the possible misallocation and characterizes the optimal inheritance tax qualitatively and quantitatively under the assumption that society’s objective is to maximize its GDP rather than a social welfare function. Substantive findings include: 1) the tradeoff faced by the society is exactly between correcting the misallocation of bequeathed capital and distorting parents’ bequest incentives; 2) the inheritance tax should be more progressive when i) dispersion of individual productivity is larger, ii) parents’ altruistic “sentiment” toward children is stronger, iii) the extent of leaky bucket associated with administrative costs is higher, and iv) the capital share in production is higher if dispersion of individual productivity is sufficiently large; 3) quantitative results from calibrating the U.S. economy suggest that it is desirable to increase the progressivity of the inheritance tax substantially from the current level.
