Wealthier households obtain higher returns on their investments than poorer ones. How should the tax system account for this return inequality? I study capital taxation in an economy in which return rates endogenously correlate with wealth. The leading example is a financial market, where the...

There is increasing empirical evidence that people systematically differ in their rates of return on capital. We derive optimal non-linear taxes on labor and capital income in the presence of such return heterogeneity. We allow for two distinct reasons why returns are heterogeneous: because...

This paper studies optimal dynamic capital taxation under the progress of skill-biased technologyand finds a novel reason for taxing capital. We demonstrate that the optimal capital tax rate can be expressed as a function of time-invariable social welfare weights and a time-variable (a) skill...

I study the optimal taxation of robots and labor income. In the model, robots substitute for routine labor and complement non-routine labor. I show that while it is optimal to distort robot adoption, robots may be either taxed or subsidized. The robot tax exploits general-equilibrium effects to...

This paper presents the properties of optimal piecewise linear tax systems for two-earner households, based on joint and individual incomes respectively. A key contribution is the analysis of the interaction between second earner wage differences, variation in the price of child care and...

This paper analyses optimal piecewise linear tax systems for two-earner households, based on joint and individual incomes respectively. It models the interaction between wage rates and variation in child care prices and productivities as determinants of across-household heterogeneity in second...

This paper shows that a policy maker needs only two types of information to set the optimal income tax rate at the top: the compensated elasticity of labor supply and the shape of income distribution. Unlike recent results in the literature our paper shows that income effects are immaterial for...

This paper investigates household decisions, and optimal taxation in an overlapping generations model in which individual utility depends on a weighted average of consumption of ones peers — a “keeping up with the Joneses” consumption externality. In contrast to representative agent...

With capital‐skill complementarity, the secular decline in the price of capital equipment due to equipment‐specific technological progress (ESTP) keeps pushing up the demand for skilled relative to unskilled labor and raising the skill premium. This paper quantitatively characterizes the...

We study the optimality of taxing capital income according to a Rate-of-Return Allowance proposed by the Mirrlees Review. In a mean-variance framework the optimal tax on risk-free returns is zero with constant returns to scale in private investment, but positive with decreasing returns to scale,...