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来源类型 | Working Paper |
规范类型 | 报告 |
DOI | 10.3386/w12685 |
来源ID | Working Paper 12685 |
The Optimal Income Taxation of Couples | |
Henrik Jacobsen Kleven; Claus Thustrup Kreiner; Emmanuel Saez | |
发表日期 | 2006-11-09 |
出版年 | 2006 |
语种 | 英语 |
摘要 | This paper analyzes the optimal income tax treatment of couples. Each couple is modelled as a single rational economic agent supplying labor along two dimensions: primary and secondary earnings. We consider fully general joint income tax systems. Separate taxation is never optimal if social welfare depends on total couple incomes. In a model where secondary earners make only a binary work decision (work or not work), we demonstrate that the marginal tax rate of the primary earner is lower when the spouse works. As a result, the tax distortion on the secondary earner decreases with the earnings of the primary earner and actually vanishes to zero asymptotically. Such negative jointness is optimal because redistribution from two-earner toward one-earner couples is more valuable when primary earner income is lower. We also consider a model where both spouses display intensive labor supply responses. In that context, we show that, starting from the optimal separable tax schedules, introducing some negative jointness is always desirable. Numerical simulations suggest that, in that model, it is also optimal for the marginal tax rate on one earner to decrease with the earnings of his/her spouse. We argue that many actual redistribution systems, featuring family-based transfers combined with individually-based taxes, generate schedules with negative jointness. |
主题 | Public Economics ; Taxation |
URL | https://www.nber.org/papers/w12685 |
来源智库 | National Bureau of Economic Research (United States) |
引用统计 | |
资源类型 | 智库出版物 |
条目标识符 | http://119.78.100.153/handle/2XGU8XDN/570347 |
推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714 | Henrik Jacobsen Kleven,Claus Thustrup Kreiner,Emmanuel Saez. The Optimal Income Taxation of Couples. 2006. |
条目包含的文件 | ||||||
文件名称/大小 | 资源类型 | 版本类型 | 开放类型 | 使用许可 | ||
w12685.pdf(520KB) | 智库出版物 | 限制开放 | CC BY-NC-SA | 浏览 |
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