中文摘要
工人在地点、职业、技能和工时上的离散选择构成了其收入的基础。本文分析离散创收选择的最优税收问题。我们针对混合 Logit 选择环境推导了最优税收方程和帕累托检验不等式;该环境能够容纳离散且无特定结构的选择集、丰富的偏好异质性,以及各选择之间复杂的总体交叉替代模式。这些方程将最优税收与社会再分配目标和私人替代行为明确联系起来,其中后者被编码为一个替代矩阵,用以描述选择分布对税收引致的效用变化的交叉敏感性。在重复混合 Logit 设定中,替代矩阵恰好等于冲击引致的个体在各选择之间转移的马尔可夫矩阵。我们阐述了这一等价关系对于评估现行税收设计以及对最优政策混合 Logit 模型进行结构估计的启示。我们将研究结果应用于两个突出的例子:空间税收和对夫妇的税收。
Abstract
Discrete location, occupation, skill, and hours choices of workers underpin their incomes. This paper analyzes the optimal taxation of discrete income‐generating choice. It derives optimal tax equations and Pareto test inequalities for mixed logit choice environments that can accommodate discrete and unstructured choice sets, rich preference heterogeneity, and complex aggregate cross‐substitution patterns between choices. These equations explicitly connect optimal taxes to societal redistributive goals and private substitution behavior, with the latter encoded as a substitution matrix that describes cross‐sensitivities of choice distributions to tax‐induced utility variation. In repeated mixed logit settings, the substitution matrix is exactly the Markov matrix of shock‐induced agent transitions across choices. We describe implications of this equivalence for evaluation of prevailing tax designs and the structural estimation of optimal policy mixed logit models. We apply our results to two salient examples: spatial taxation and taxation of couples.