Direct Versus Indirect Taxation: The Design of the Tax Structure Revisited
研究当个体在生产率与禀赋等不可观测特征上存在差异时，如何设计最优的直接税与间接税组合，并证明即使偏好可分，差别商品税仍是有效的政策工具。
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.