Pareto-Improving Optimal Capital and Labor Taxes
研究在异质性个体模型中，通过逐步改革实现帕累托改进的税收政策：长期资本税为零，但短期应保持高资本税并削减劳动税，以促进资本增长和工人福利。
We study Pareto-optimal scal policy in a model with agents who are heterogeneous in their labor productivity and wealth. We show a natural modi cation of the standard Ramsey problem to guarantee that long-run capital taxes are zero. We focus on Paretoimproving policies and we nd that a gradual reform is crucial in achieving a Pareto improvement: labor taxes should be cut and capital taxes should remain high for a very long time before reaching zero. Therefore, the long-run optimal tax mix is the opposite of the short- and medium-run one. This policy redistributes wealth in favor of workers so that all agents bene t, and it favors quick capital growth after the reform. The labor tax cut is nanced by de cits which lead to a positive level of government debt in the long run, reversing the standard prediction that the government accumulates savings in models with optimal capital taxes. The welfare bene ts from the tax reform are relatively large and they can be shifted entirely to capitalists or workers by varying the length of the transition. We address a number of technical issues such as su ciency of Lagrangian solutions in a Ramsey problem, relation of Pareto-improving allocations with welfare functions, asymptotic behavior, and solution algorithms.