Dynamic Taxation Stantcheva, Stefanie
IDEAS Working Paper Series from RePEc,
01/2020
Paper
Open access
This paper reviews recent advances in the study of dynamic taxation, considering three main approaches: the dynamic Mirrlees, the parametric Ramsey, and the sufficient statistics approaches. In the ...first approach, agents' heterogeneous abilities to earn income are private information and evolve stochastically over time. Dynamic taxes are not ex ante restricted and are set for redistribution and insurance considerations. Capital is taxed only in order to improve incentives to work. Human capital is optimally subsidized if it reduces post-tax inequality and risk on balance. The Ramsey approach specifies ex ante restricted tax instruments and adopts quantitative methods, which allows it to consider more complex and realistic economies. Capital taxes are optimal when age-dependent labor income taxes are not possible. The newer and tractable sufficient statistics approach derives robust tax formulas that depend on estimable elasticities and features of the income distributions. It simplifies the transitional dynamics thanks to a newly defined criterion, the “utility-based steady state approach” that prevents the government from exploiting sluggish responses in the short-run. Capital taxes are here based on the standard equity-efficiency trade-off.
I study how people understand, reason, and learn about tax policy. The goal is to uncover the mental models that people use to think about income and estate taxes. To that end, I run large-scale ...online surveys and experiments on representative U.S. samples to elicit not only respondents' factual knowledge about tax policy and the income or wealth distributions, but also their understanding of the mechanisms of tax policy and their reasoning about it. The detailed survey questions are designed to address the three main factors emphasized in our core tax model that can shape support for or opposition to taxes: efficiency effects, distributional implications, and fairness considerations. But they also elicit broader concerns that could influence policy views, such as misperceptions, views of government, perceived spillovers from taxes, and views on how tax revenues are or should be spent. I decompose policy views into the various underlying factors and find that support for tax policy is most strongly correlated with views on the benefits of redistribution and fairness, as well as with views of the government. Efficiency concerns play a more minor role. These correlational patterns are confirmed by the experimental approach, which shows people instructional videos that explain the workings and consequences of one of the aspects of tax policy (the ``Redistribution'' and the ``Efficiency'' treatments) or that bring the two together and focus on the trade-off (the ``Economist'' treatment). The Redistribution treatment and Economist treatments significantly increase support for more progressive taxes. I also find that there are partisan divergences not just in the final policy views, but also at every step of the reasoning about the underlying mechanisms of taxes, and most starkly on the fairness considerations.
Dynamic Taxation Stantcheva, Stefanie
IDEAS Working Paper Series from RePEc,
01/2020
Paper
Open access
This paper reviews recent advances in the study of dynamic taxation, considering three main approaches: the dynamic Mirrlees, the parametric Ramsey, and the sufficient statistics approaches. In the ...first approach, agents' heterogeneous abilities to earn income are private information and evolve stochastically over time. Dynamic taxes are not ex ante restricted and are set for redistribution and insurance considerations. Capital is taxed only in order to improve incentives to work. Human capital is optimally subsidized if it reduces post-tax inequality and risk on balance. The Ramsey approach specifies ex ante restricted tax instruments and adopts quantitative methods, which allows it to consider more complex and realistic economies. Capital taxes are optimal when age-dependent labor income taxes are not possible. The newer and tractable sufficient statistics approach derives robust tax formulas that depend on estimable elasticities and features of the income distributions. It simplifies the transitional dynamics thanks to a newly defined criterion, the ``utility-based steady state approach" that prevents the government from exploiting sluggish responses in the short-run. Capital taxes are here based on the standard equity-efficiency trade-off.
This paper illustrates the design and use of open-ended survey questions as a way of eliciting people's first-order concerns on policies. Multiple choice questions are the backbone of most surveys, ...but they may prime respondents to select answer options that they would not naturally have thought about, and they may omit relevant options. Open-ended questions that do not constrain respondents with specific answer choices are a valuable tool for eliciting first-order thinking. We discuss three text analysis methods to analyze open-ended questions' answers. To illustrate how to apply these methods, we provide evidence from large-scale surveys on income and estate taxation. We show the that key concerns relate mostly to distribution issues, fairness, and government, rather than to efficiency concerns. There are large partisan gaps in the first-order concerns on policies.
This paper illustrates the design and use of open-ended survey questions as a way of eliciting people's first-order concerns on policies. Multiple choice questions are the backbone of most surveys, ...but they may prime respondents to select answer options that they would not naturally have thought about, and they may omit relevant options. Open-ended questions that do not constrain respondents with specific answer choices are a valuable tool for eliciting first-order thinking. We discuss three text analysis methods to analyze open-ended questions' answers. To illustrate how to apply these methods, we provide evidence from large-scale surveys on income and estate taxation. We show the that key concerns relate mostly to distribution issues, fairness, and government, rather than to efficiency concerns. There are large partisan gaps in the first-order concerns on policies.
This paper illustrates the design and use of open-ended survey questions as a way of eliciting people's first-order concerns on policies. Multiple choice questions are the backbone of most surveys, ...but they may prime respondents to select answer options that they would not naturally have thought about, and they may omit relevant options. Open-ended questions that do not constrain respondents with specific answer choices are a valuable tool for eliciting first-order thinking. We discuss three text analysis methods to analyze open-ended questions' answers. To illustrate how to apply these methods, we provide evidence from large-scale surveys on income and estate taxation. We show the that key concerns relate mostly to distribution issues, fairness, and government, rather than to efficiency concerns. There are large partisan gaps in the first-order concerns on policies.
One of the biggest challenges that countries face today is the very unequal distributions of opportunities, resources, income and wealth across people. Inclusive prosperity – whereby many people from ...different backgrounds can benefit from economic growth, new technologies, and the fruits of globalization – remains elusive. To address these issues, societies face choices among many different policies and institutional arrangements to try to ensure a proper supply of productive jobs and activities, as well as access to education, financial means, and other endowments that prepare individuals for their participation in the economy. In this paper we offer a simple, organizing framework to think about policies for inclusive prosperity. We provide a comprehensive taxonomy of policies, distinguishing among the types of inequality they address and the stages of the economy where the intervention takes place. The taxonomy clarifies the differences among contending approaches to equity and inclusion and can help analysts assess the impacts and implications of different policies and identify potential gaps.
According to the World Values Survey, 70% of Americans believe that the poor can make it out of poverty on their own. According to survey research that colleagues and I recently conducted and ...analyzed, Americans estimate that among children in the lowest income bracket, 12% will make it to the top bracket by the time they retire. ...when conservatives learn that social mobility is lower than they thought, they believe government is the problem, not the solution.
Using new large-scale survey and experimental data, we investigate how respondents perceive racial inequities between Black and white Americans, what they believe causes them, and what interventions, ...if any, they think should be implemented to reduce them. We intentionally oversample Black respondents, cover many cities in the US, and survey both adults and very young people aged 13 to 17. In the experimental parts, we consider the causal impact of information on racial inequities (such as the evolution of the Black-white earnings gap or the differences in mobility for Black and white children) and explanations for these inequities (i.e., the deep-seated roots and long-lasting consequences of systemic racism) on respondents' views. Although there is heterogeneity in how respondents perceive the magnitude of current racial gaps in economic conditions and opportunities, the biggest discrepancies are in how they explain them. There is a stark partisan gap among white respondents, particularly in the perceived causes of racial inequities and what should be done about them. White Democrats and Black respondents are much more likely to attribute racial inequities to adverse past and present circumstances and want to act on them with race-targeted and general redistribution policies. At the same time, white Republicans are more likely to attribute racial gaps to individual actions. These views are already deeply entrenched in teenagers based on their race and their parents' political affiliation. A policy decomposition shows that the perceived causes of racial inequities correlate most strongly with support for race-targeted or general redistribution policies, a finding confirmed by the experimental results.
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