Capital income taxation in growing open economies

Capital Taxation May Survive in Open Economies

Why do capital taxes still exist in an integrated world economy? When capital is perfectly mobile across countries and labour is fixed, a source-based tax on capital both reduces and redistributes world income. In a simple general equilibrium model we show that under plausible circumstances there always exists a country that benefits from introducing such a tax. Countries that are richer in ter...

Optimal Capital Income Taxation∗

In an economy with identical infinitely-lived households that obtain utility from leisure as well as consumption, Chamley (1986) and Judd (1985) have shown that the optimal tax system to pay for an exogenous stream of government purchases involves a zero tax rate on capital in the long run, with tax revenue collected by a distortionary tax on labor income. Extending the results of Hall and Jorg...

Can Capital Income Taxes Survive in an Open Economies ?

Optimal capital income taxation and redistribution

This paper studies the e ects of agent heterogeneity on optimal capital income tax rates. In a two period model with arbitrarily many heterogeneous agents, we explicitly derive the welfare e ects of taxation depending on the distribution of the agents' characteristics. In particular, we show that the sign of the optimal capital income tax rate depends not on the extent of inequality in goods en...

On the Optimal Taxation of Capital Income

We show that in models in which labor services are supplied jointly with human capital, the Chamley and Judd result on zero capital income taxation in the limit extends to labor taxes as long as accumulation technologies are constant returns to scale. Moreover, for a class of widely used preferences, consumption taxes are zero in the limit as well. However, we show by the construction of two ex...