Optimal Taxation of Entrepreneurial Capital and Financial Assets with Private Information

本项目的目的是研究私营信息经济中创业资本和金融资产的最优税收。资本所得税的最优设置是宏观经济学和公共财政学的经典问题。人们之所以对创业资本感兴趣，是因为人们注意到，在美国经济中，这种形式的资本占家庭财富的比例高得不成比例。研究人员认为，企业家的主要风险来源是资本风险，信息摩擦导致的激励问题在创业活动中发挥着核心作用。为了刻画最优税制的特征，她首先推导了在信息摩擦下的约束帕累托最优分配，然后构造了一组实现这种分配的税收。由此产生的税收制度优化了保险和激励之间的权衡。私人信息决定了在受限的帕累托最优配置下，额外财富单位的边际收益和当前消费的边际效用之间的楔子。前期工作得出了一个重要的结果：这种临时楔子对创业资本可能是负的，在这种情况下，最优的边际资本税是累进的。相比之下，在存在劳动收入风险的私人信息经济中，跨期楔形总是正的，最优边际资产税是递减的。这个项目说明了资本和其他资产的不同激励效应，这些效应支撑了这一结果，并引发了差别资产税的处方。拟议的新工作将在多个方向上扩展目前的分析。从理论上讲，研究者计划推导出创业资本的跨期楔入为负的一般条件，并探索其对消费限制分配的影响。我们将分析允许企业家和经济中的其他代理人之间签订私人合同的市场结构的最优税收。她还计划对最优税收制度进行量化分析，使用企业家收入的微观经济数据来衡量资本风险。这项研究的预期贡献是双重的。对有资本风险的经济体的关注，为信息摩擦导致的动态扭曲提供了新的见解，并可能导致长期不平等。众所周知，在存在劳动收入风险的经济体中，最优分配表现为代理人一生中的消费减少，并通常预测消费和财富不平等应该无限制地增长。该项目探讨了资本对企业家激励的积极影响，这些影响可能会缓和这些极端的影响。这位研究者还首次提出了基于信息摩擦的差别资产征税理论。这在有劳动收入风险的经济体中不会出现，因为最优资本所得税的质量属性不取决于资产的性质。最后，对最优分配和税收的联合预测可以为更现实的量化分析提供基础，从而能够全面评估家庭财富的实际税制与最优税制。由于资本风险激励问题的新颖性，这项研究的结果将引起关注动态机制设计的研究人员的兴趣，以及宏观经济学和公共财政的研究人员。此外，鉴于美国和其他国家正在就税制改革进行公开辩论，政策制定者自然会对这个项目的发现感兴趣。这项研究还将与调查员的教学相结合，特别是在研究生层面。预计研究生研究助理将被介绍重要的研究技能和潜在的研究主题，以便自己开发。

The purpose of this project is to study the optimal taxation of entrepreneurial capital and financial assets in private information economies. The optimal setting of taxes on capital income is a classic question in macroeconomics and public finance. The interest in entrepreneurial capital is motivated by the observation that this form of capital accounts for a disproportionately large fraction of household wealth in the US economy. The investigator maintains that the main source of risk for entrepreneurs is capital risk and that incentive problems due to informational frictions play a central role in entrepreneurial activity. To characterize the optimal tax system, she first derives the constrained Pareto optimal allocation given the informational frictions, and then constructs a set of taxes that implements such an allocation. The resulting tax system optimizes the trade-off between insurance and incentives. The private information determines a wedge between the marginal benefit of an additional unit of wealth and the marginal utility of current consumption at the constrained Pareto optimal allocation. The preliminary work derives an important result: this intertermporal wedge can be negative for entrepreneurial capital and, in this case, the optimal marginal capital tax is progressive. By contrast, in private information economies with labor income risk, the intertemporal wedge is always positive and the optimal marginal asset tax is regressive. This project illustrates the different incentive effects of capital and other assets that underpin this result and also give rise to a prescription for differential asset taxation. The proposed new work will extends the current analysis in a number of directions. Theoretically, the investigator plans to derive general conditions under which the intertermporal wedge on entrepreneurial capital is negative and explore the implications for the limiting distribution of consumption. We will analyze optimal taxes for market structures that allow for private contracts between entrepreneurs and other agents in the economy. She also plans to conduct a quantitative analysis of optimal tax systems, using microeconomic data on entrepreneurial earnings to calibrate capital risk.The intended contribution of this study is twofold. The focus on economies with capital risk provides novel insights on the dynamic distortions resulting from informational frictions and, potentially, for long run inequality. As is well known, in economies with labor income risk optimal allocations display decreasing consumption over agents' lifetime and generally predict that consumption and wealth inequality should grow without bound. The project explores positive effects of capital on entrepreneurial incentives that may temper these extreme implications. This investigator is also the first to propose a theory of differential asset taxation based on informational frictions. This does not arise in economies with labor income risk, where the qualitative properties of optimal capital income taxes do not depend on the nature of the asset. Finally, the joint predictions for optimal allocations and taxes can provide the basis for a more realistic quantitative analysis that could enable a comprehensive assessment of actual systems of taxation of household wealth in comparison with the optimal ones.Broader Impacts The results of this study will be of interest to researchers focusing on dynamic mechanism design, given the novelty of the incentive problem with capital risk, as well as to researchers in macroeconomics and in public finance. Moreover, given the ongoing public debate on tax reform in the US and in other countries, the findings from this project will naturally be interesting for policymakers. The research will also be integrated with the investigator's teaching, especially at the graduate level. It is expected that graduate research assistants will be introduced to important research skills and potential research topics to develop on their own.