Optimal Taxation: Inequality and Family Size

这项研究的目的是增加我们关于社会安全设置应该如何设计的知识。这些措施总是涉及一个重要的权衡--我们必须平衡向社会上那些不幸的人提供利益所获得的好处和因税收过高而阻止人们工作所付出的代价。本研究关注的具体问题是家庭规模应该如何进入方程。这一点很重要，因为它将帮助我们了解税法的关键特征应该如何构建。例如，确定儿童税收减免的规模、儿童保育费用的处理和中学后教育费用的扣除。最重要的是，将开发新的方法技术，以提高我们对劳动和资本所得税制度应该如何设计来管理社会风险分担和经济效率之间的权衡的理解。智力优势：这项研究将涉及对现有方法的重大改进，以分析适当的社会保险金额。目前，这些方法要么将自己限制在静态设置中(这样就不能包括储蓄、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自己。虽然这两种目前可用的方法都是有用的，但由于它们隐含的强有力的假设，它们也是有限的。这项研究将提供一个有用的额外工具，帮助更好地理解这些问题。更广泛的影响：开发这样的方法对于我们理解更广泛的政策问题至关重要。例如：政府政策是否应该明确鼓励储蓄，而不是个人通常会自行承担的储蓄？如果是这样的话，这些政策应该采取什么形式？这个问题的答案如何被需要其他成功的激励措施来激励个人努力工作？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，这些新技术的开发也应被证明对有关这些制度的政策辩论有用。除此之外，所开发的方法应该对经济学中的各种其他相关研究项目有用，包括但不限于研究家庭(即妻子、丈夫和孩子)对劳动力供应、家庭生产和消费的分配。

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.