Political economy of Ramsey taxation
نویسندگان
چکیده
We study the dynamic taxation of capital and labor in the neoclassical growth model under the assumption that taxes and public good provision are decided by a self-interested politician who cannot commit to policies. Citizens can imperfectly control the politician using elections similar to a political agency model. As in the standard dynamic taxation models, we only allow for linear taxes on capital and labor income. The celebrated Chamley-Judd result shows that, with a benevolent government that has full commitment power, long-run capital taxes should be equal to zero. We show that, as long as the discount factor of the politician is equal to or greater than that of the citizens, the same result holds in an environment where the government is controlled by a self-interested politician and there is no commitment to policies. In contrast, if the politician is less patient than the citizens, the best (subgame perfect) equilibrium from the viewpoint of the citizens involves long-run capital taxation. JEL Classi cation: H11, H21, E61, P16. Keywords: capital taxation, scal policy, political economy. We are grateful to Andrew Atkeson, Tim Besley, V.V. Chari, Stephen Coate, and Pierre Yared for comments. We thank Georgy Egorov and Oleg Itskhoki for research assistance and the National Science Foundation for nancial support.
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تاریخ انتشار 2008