Evidence on the High-Income Laffer Curve from Six Decades of Tax Reform
利用六十年间多次税改数据，分析高收入人群对边际税率的行为反应，发现除1980年代外，其响应程度相对温和，且1980年代估计的弹性高于任何更早税改。
A burgeoning literature in public finance seeks to estimate the impact of marginal tax rates on the behavior of the rich. This literature argues that by leading people to shift income out of taxable form when rates rise, high marginal rates and progressivitiy in the tax code can create a substantial deadweight loss while raising little revenue, even if the elasticity of labor supply is zero. The literature has used natural experiment methods on data from the tax cuts of the 1980s and estimated a large behavioral response of high-income taxpayers. In this paper, I use the same methods as this literature but examine tax changes from previous decades that generated the same type of tax variation as the tax cuts of the 1980s but with potentially fewer, or at least different, problems of spurious correlation. The evidence from both aggregate cross-sectional data on tax returns and panel data on executive compensation indicates that the responsiveness of high-income people seems to be relatively modest in almost all time periods except the 1980s. The lowest estimates of the elasticity based on the 1980s data exceed even the highest estimates from data on any previous tax change.