Should labor force participation be subsidized?

We study optimal taxation in an environment where the agents di er in their work opportunity costs. The opportunity cost of work is xed, independent of the number of hours worked: the only decision of the agents is to (full time) participate, or not, in the labor force. The planner, who does not observe the opportunity costs, is utilitarian. We nd a large class of planner objectives where it is optimal to have the low skilled workers work more than in the laissezfaire. At the optimum, their net income at work is larger than the sum of their subsistence income and of their productivity. This property holds when the social weights attached to the unemployed are not too large, in particular when the average social weight of the unemployed is not larger than the social weight of the marginal employee. It is robust to the presence of income e ects. Our results provide theoretical foundations for low skilled work subsidy by linking the scope of welfare to work programs to the society redistributive objectives. JEL classi cation numbers: H21, H31.