Optimal Taxation: Inequality and Family Size

最优税收：不平等和家庭规模

• 批准号: 0962432
• 负责人: Larry Jones
• 金额: $ 25.18万
• 依托单位: University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2010
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2010-07-01 至 2014-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0962432&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Optimal; Taxation; Inequality; Family; Size

The purpose of this research is to add to our knowledge about how social safety sets should be designed. These always involve an important trade-off--we have to balance the benefits gained from providing benefits to those individuals in society who are unfortunate against the costs from discouraging people from working because taxes are too high. The specific issue that this research focuses on is how family size should enter into the equation. This is important because it will help us understand how key features of the tax code should be constructed. Examples include setting the size of tax deductions for children, the treatment of child care costs and the deductibility of expenses for post secondary education. On top of this, new methodological techniques will be developed that will improve our understanding of the way that labor and capital income tax systems should be designed to manage this trade-off between social risk sharing and economic efficiency.Intellectual Merit: The research will involve significant methodological improvements over existing methods for analyzing the right amount of social insurance. Currently, these methods either restrict themselves to static settings (so that dynamic variables such as savings, education and family size cannot be included) or rely on assumptions that society values future generations more highly that parents do themselves. While both of these currently available methodologies are useful, they are also limited because of their implicit strong assumptions. This research will provide a useful additional tool to help understand these problems better.Broader Impacts: The development of methods like these are critical to our understanding of broader policy issues. For example: Should government policies explicitly encourage savings above and beyond what individuals would normally undertake on their own? And if so, what form should these policies take? How is the answer to this question tempered by the need to other succient incentives for individuals to work hard? Since private savings decisions are intimately related to the design of Social Security and Medicare systems, the development of these new techniques should also prove useful for policy debates concerning those systems. In addition to this, the methods developed should be useful for a variety of other, related, research programs in economics, including, but not limited to the study of the family (i.e., wife, husband and children) allocation of labor supply, home production and consumption.

本研究的目的是增加我们对如何设计社会保障集的知识。这总是涉及到一个重要的权衡——我们必须平衡为社会中那些不幸的人提供福利所获得的好处，与因税收太高而使人们不工作所带来的成本。这项研究关注的具体问题是家庭规模应该如何进入这个等式。这一点很重要，因为它将帮助我们理解应该如何构建税法的关键特征。例子包括设定子女的扣税额、照顾子女的费用的处理和中学后教育费用的扣除。最重要的是，新的方法技术将被开发，这将提高我们对劳动和资本所得税制度的设计方式的理解，以管理社会风险分担和经济效率之间的权衡。智力优势：该研究将涉及对现有的社会保险合理数额分析方法的重大方法改进。目前，这些方法要么将自己限制在静态环境中（因此不能包括储蓄、教育和家庭规模等动态变量），要么依赖于这样的假设，即社会对后代的重视程度高于父母对自己的重视。虽然这两种目前可用的方法都很有用，但由于其隐含的强假设，它们也有局限性。这项研究将提供一个有用的额外工具来帮助更好地理解这些问题。更广泛的影响：这些方法的发展对于我们理解更广泛的政策问题至关重要。例如：政府的政策是否应该明确鼓励超出个人通常可以自行承担的储蓄？如果是这样，这些政策应该采取什么形式？由于需要其他激励个人努力工作的后续激励措施，这个问题的答案是如何缓和的？由于私人储蓄决策与社会保障和医疗保险制度的设计密切相关，这些新技术的发展也应该证明对有关这些制度的政策辩论是有用的。除此之外，所开发的方法应该对各种其他相关的经济学研究项目有用，包括但不限于对家庭（即妻子，丈夫和孩子）劳动力供给分配，家庭生产和消费的研究。