期刊名称：CORE Discussion Papers / Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (UCL), Louvain
出版年度：2002
卷号：2002
出版社：Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (UCL), Louvain
摘要：As recently argued by Diamond [1998], one of the key factors explaining the
progressivity of an optimal non-linear income tax is the distribution of productivity
among workers. Migration is one source of changes in the productivity distribution.
How changes in the population’s ability distribution affect optimal income tax schedules
has received little attention. Changing the distribution generally changes both the
objective function and the government budget constraint. We first consider the
comparative statics of the fraction of highly-skilled workers with a Rawlsian welfare
function (so that only the second effect is present) and a quasi-linear utility function. We
perform the same analysis for a despotic social welfare function, and present some results
for a utilitarian social welfare function.
We study the interaction between mobility and redistributive taxation. We
consider mobility by either the skilled or unskilled population in both Rawlsian and
majority voting frameworks where governments take the population as fixed. Our main
result is that equal ability distributions across jurisdictions is a stable equilibrium when
the unskilled are mobile, but only under certain conditions when the skilled are mobile.
