Presidential Address 2019: How Should Tax Progressivity Respond to Rising Income Inequality?
在一个包含异质性主体、不完全市场、外生风险、技能投资和弹性劳动供给的模型中，研究了税收累进性如何应对技能偏向型技术进步和残差工资分散度上升导致的收入不平等加剧。
Abstract We address the question in the title in a heterogeneous-agent incomplete-market model featuring exogenous idiosyncratic risk, endogenous skill investment, and flexible labor supply. The tax and transfer schedule is restricted to being log-linear in income, a good description of the US system. Rising inequality is modeled as a combination of skill-biased technical change and growth in residual wage dispersion. When facing shifts in the income distribution like those observed in the United States, a utilitarian planner chooses higher progressivity in response to larger residual inequality but lower progressivity in response to widening skill price dispersion reflecting technical change. Overall, optimal progressivity is approximately unchanged between 1980 and 2016. We document that the progressivity of the actual US tax and transfer system has similarly changed little since 1980, in line with the model prescription.