A note on optimal taxation, status consumption, and unemployment
研究了存在地位驱动消费和均衡失业时，最优边际税收政策如何调整，发现两种市场失灵之间的交互效应是决定税收结构的关键，某些情况下地位外部性甚至导致更低边际税率。
Existing research on optimal taxation in economies with status-driven relative consumption (implicitly) assumes that there is no involuntary unemployment, despite ample evidence that real world labor markets are typically characterized by such unemployment. We show how the marginal tax policy ought to be modified to simultaneously account for positional consumption externalities and equilibrium unemployment, and find that interaction effects between these two market failures are crucial determinants of the marginal tax structure. In certain cases, the policy incentive to tax away positional externalities vanishes completely, and negative positional externalities may even lead to lower marginal taxation, under involuntary unemployment.