Efficiency Criteria, Income Taxation, and Heterogeneous Elasticities
研究所得税政策中帕累托效率与功利主义福利的关系，发现当应税收入弹性在相同收入水平内异质性过高时，传统税收合理性检验失效，对政策制定者有重要参考价值。
A common interpretation of Pareto-efficient policies is that, for some cardinal utility representations of preferences, they maximize utilitarian welfare. We show in the context of income taxation that such cardinalizations are often extreme, requiring unbounded curvature of utility with respect to consumption. Taxes can be justified as utilitarian without these extreme cardinalizations if and only if revenues are decreasing and concave in a class of narrowly targeted tax cuts. We reformulate this condition as a sufficient-statistics test. The test fails whenever elasticities of taxable income are too heterogeneous within some income level, as we argue is empirically likely.