Optimal Income Taxation with Composition Effects
研究指出最优税收公式中的充分统计量权重会随政策变化，忽略这种构成效应会导致低估最优税率，对美国高收入群体的模拟显示低估约6个百分点。
Abstract Providing estimable sufficient statistics to give policy prescriptions has become a widespread approach, a well-known limitation of which is the endogeneity of sufficient statistics to the policy. Using optimal tax policy as our field of application, we highlight a new source of endogeneity. It arises under multidimensional heterogeneity, because optimal tax formulas are then expressed as functions of weighted means of sufficient statistics computed at the individual level and the weights are endogenous to the tax policy. We analytically show that ignoring these composition effects leads to underestimate the optimal linear tax and, under a restrictive set of assumptions, the optimal nonlinear tax as well. In the latter case, we use an improved tax perturbation approach to study composition effects without these assumptions. Numerical simulations on US data suggest the optimal tax rate may be underestimated by 6 p.p. for high incomes levels. We also relate our tax perturbation method to the first-order mechanism design method, both methods having hitherto been used separately to derive optimal tax schedules.