abstract t he return of capital is fundamental to the intertemporal allocation of resources by changing the consumption behavior and capital accumulation over time. taxation on return of capital increases the marginal product of capital, meaning that capital stock is lower than when capital is not taxed, which results decreased growth and welfare in steady state. this paper studies the impact o...

The recent literature on taxation and growth has stressed the optimality of a zero long-run taxation on all accumulative factors of production. For a given path of government spending, the optimal tax plan requires the government to build up a positive stock of public wealth in the short run in the long-run, government spending can be financed with the income accruing from the management of the...

To analyze the optimal social insurance package, we set up a two-period life-cycle model with risky human capital investment, where the government has access to labor taxation, education subsidies and capital taxation. Social insurance is provided by redistributive labor taxation. Moreover, both education subsidies and capital taxation are used as catalyzers to facilitate social insurance by mi...

The paper discusses the implications of optimal tax theory for the debates on uniform commodity taxation and neutral capital income taxation. While strong administrative and political economy arguments in favor of uniform and neutral taxation remain, recent advances in optimal tax theory suggest that the information needed to implement the differentiated taxation prescribed by optimal tax theor...

Optimal Taxation with Capital Accumulation and Wage Bargaining This study examines optimal taxation in a unionized economy in which households save capital. The main findings are as follows. Judd’s (1985) and Chamley’s (1986) classical results of zero taxation on capital income holds. This is true independently of workers’ savings behaviour or the capitalists’ weight in the social welfare funct...

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...

We set up a two-period model, where individuals finance educational investment and first-period consumption by borrowing against risky second-period labor income. We show that the government should use both education subsidies and capital taxation to mitigate distortions, stemming from social insurance through labor taxation, and we derive a Ramsey-rule for the optimal combination of these inst...

We set up an OLG-model, where households choose human capital investment and decide on investing their endogenous savings in a portfolio of riskless and risky assets. Thereby, the households are exposed to both aggregate wage and capital risks due to technological shocks. We derive the optimal public policy mix of taxation and education policy and show that risks can be optimally diversified on...

We consider an environment in which agents’ skills are private information and follow arbitrary stochastic processes. We prove that it is typically Pareto optimal for an individual’s marginal benefit of investing in capital to exceed his marginal cost of doing so. This wedge is consistent with a positive tax on capital income. We also prove that it is Pareto optimal for the marginal rate of sub...