Review of Economic Studies · 2026 · [{"name": "Narayana Kocherlakota", "affiliation": ["University of Rochester"]}]
中文摘要
本文在一个灵活的道德风险模型框架下, 重新考察针对极富人群的最优劳动所得税问题。在这一设定中, 风险并非外生给定; 相反, 每个行为人都可以通过将固定的时间禀赋分配到多种不同任务上, 影响所有可能收入结果的概率。我证明, 高收入者的最优所得税率与税前劳动收入分布的最优帕累托尾部指数, 二者均由行为人偏好内生决定。特别是, 一个由风险厌恶程度较低的行为人构成的社会, 会发现对富人征收较低税率是最优的, 尽管其成员的选择会产生较小的帕累托右尾指数。相比之下, 在经典的 Mirrlees (1971)–Diamond (1998)–Saez (2001) 框架中, 这种不平等与最优税率之间的负向共变, 只是对外生技能分布变化所作出的次优反应。
Abstract
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.