Distributional Tax Analysis in Theory and Practice: Harberger Meets Diamond-Mirrlees
中文摘要
本文提出了一个研究当期税收分配及税制改革效应的新框架。对于当期税收，劳动税归于相应的劳动者，资本税归于相应的资产所有者，消费税归于相应的消费者。当期税收既反映了税前价格（与生产相关）和税后价格（与家庭的工作、储蓄和消费决策相关）之间的楔子，也反映了税收的直接公平效应，但不涉及效率问题。我们的方法不需要结构性假设，具有内部一致性，并最大限度地提高了税收累进性和不平等程度在不同时期及不同国家之间的可比性。将这一方法应用于美国后，我们发现，收入最高1%人群的有效税率已从20世纪50年代初的约50%降至2021年的32%。20世纪中叶的高度税收累进性正是通过企业所得税实现的。为分析税制改革的分配效应，在戴蒙德和米尔利斯（1971）的新古典最优税收模型中，按收入群体划分的纳税义务的机械变化，以及由家庭（而非企业）行为反应引起的总税收收入效应，构成充分统计量。经典税负归宿分析所关注的税收对税前价格的影响，在规范意义上并不相关。
Abstract
This paper proposes a new framework to study the distribution of current taxes and the effects of tax reforms. For current taxes, labor taxes are assigned to the corresponding workers, capital taxes to the corresponding asset owners, and consumption taxes to the corresponding consumers. Current taxes capture the wedges between pre-tax prices (relevant for production) and after-tax prices (relevant for the work, saving, and consumption decisions of households) as well as the direct equity effects of taxes while being silent about efficiency. Our method does not require structural assumptions, is internally consistent, and maximizes the comparability of tax progressivity and inequality over time and across countries. Applying this methodology to the United States, we find that the effective tax rate of the top 1% has declined from about 50% in the early 1950s to 32% in 2021. It is through the corporate tax that a high degree of tax progressivity was achieved in the middle of the 20 th century. To analyze the distributional effects of tax reforms, mechanical changes in tax liability by income groups and aggregate revenue effects due to household (but not firms’) behavioral responses are sufficient statistics in the neoclassical optimal tax model of Diamond and Mirrlees (1971). The effects of taxes on pre-tax prices at the heart of classical tax incidence analysis are normatively irrelevant.