Dynamic Mirrleesian Taxation in the Presence of Rising Wage Inequality and Capital-skill Complementarity
2016/09/13
研討會日期 : 2016-09-13
時間 : 14:30
主講人 : Dr. Hsin-Jung Yu
主持人 : Professor Tzu-Ting Yang
地點 : Conference Room B110
演講者簡介 : Dr. Yu received his Ph.D. in Economics from National Taiwan University in 2015. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellows at the institute of Economics, Academia Sinica. His research fields are Macroeconomics, Public economics, taxation theory.
演講摘要 : Adopting the Mirrlees (1971) approach, this paper qualitatively and quantitatively characterizes the dynamics of the optimal tax structure in the face of the secular cheaping of capital equipment. With capital-skill complementarity, this secular trend keeps pushing up the demand for skilled relative to unskilled labor, contributing to the rising wage inequality between skilled and unskilled workers. We show that Mirrleesian taxation prescribes: At a point in time, (i) the intertemporal distortion on capital structure is zero but that on capital equipment is positive, and (ii) the intratemporal distortion on skilled labor is negative (subject to a lump-sum tax) but that on unskilled labor is positive (subject to a lump-sum transfer). This optimal tax structure is mainly to relax agents' incentive-compatibility constraints. Over time, the overall picture is the substitution of labor tax for capital tax at the margin. This feature is mainly to lessen the increasing efficiency loss of taxing capital equipment. These results are in sharp contrast to Werning (2007), in which capital should go untaxed and labor taxes should be perfectly smoothed.
