期刊名称：CEMFI Working Papers / Centro de Estudios Monetarios y Financieros, Madrid
出版年度：2017
卷号：2017
出版社：Centro de Estudios Monetarios y Financieros, Madrid
摘要：We analyze the role of optimal income taxation across different local labor markets. Should labor inlarge cities be taxed differently than in small cities? We find that a planner who needs to raise agiven level of revenue and is constrained by free mobility of labor across cities does not chooseequal taxes for cities of different sizes. The optimal tax schedule is location specific and taxdifferences between large and small cities depends on the level of government spending, theconcentration of housing wealth and the strength of agglomeration economies. Our estimates for theUS imply higher optimal marginal rates in big cities than in small cities. Under the current FederalIncome tax code with progressive taxes, marginal rates are already higher in big cities which havehigher wages, but the optimal difference we estimate is lower than what is currently observed.Simulating the US economy under the optimal tax schedule, there are large effects on populationmobility: the fraction of population in the 5 largest cities grows by 7.6% with 3.4% of the country-widepopulation moving to bigger cities. The welfare gains however are smaller. This is due to the fact thatmuch of the output gains are spent on the increased costs of housing construction in bigger cities.Aggregate goods consumption goes up by 1.51% while aggregate housing consumption goes downby 1.70%.
关键词：Misallocation; taxation; population mobility; city size; general equilibrium.
