Optimal Labour Income Taxation: A Flexible Moral Hazard Approach
在灵活道德风险模型中重新审视高收入者的最优劳动所得税问题，发现最优税率和税前收入分布的帕累托尾部指数由代理人偏好内生决定，风险厌恶程度越低的社会对富人征税越少。
Abstract This article reconsiders the question of optimal labour income taxes for the very rich in the context of a flexible moral hazard model. In this setting, risk is not exogenous. Rather, each agent can affect the probabilities of all possible income outcomes by allocating a fixed time endowment across a variety of distinct tasks. I prove that the optimal income tax rates on high-end earners and the optimal Pareto tail index of the pre-tax labour income distribution are both endogenously determined by agent preferences. In particular, a society with less risk-averse agents will find it optimal to impose a lower tax rate on the rich, even though its members’ choices give rise to a smaller Pareto right tail index. In contrast, this kind of negative co-movement between inequality and optimal tax rates is a suboptimal response in the classical Mirrlees (1971)–Diamond (1998)–Saez (2001) setup to changes in the exogenous distribution of skills.