Shall we keep the highly skilled at home? The optimal income tax perspective
Abstract
We examine how allowing individuals to emigrate to pay lower taxes abroad changes the optimal non-linear income tax scheme in a Mirrleesian economy. An individual emigrates if his domestic utility is less than his utility abroad net of migration costs, utilities and costs both depending on productivity. Three average social criteria are distinguished—national, citizen and resident—according to the agents whose welfare matters. A curse of the middle-skilled occurs in the first-best, and it may be optimal to let some highly skilled leave the country under the resident criterion. In the second-best, under the Citizen and Resident criteria, preventing emigration of the highly skilled is not necessarily optimal because the interaction between the incentive-compatibility and participations constraints may cause countervailing incentives. In important cases, a Rawlsian policymaker should decrease top marginal tax rates to keep everyone at home. Copyright Springer-Verlag 2012Download Info
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Bibliographic Info
Article provided by Springer in its journal Social Choice and Welfare.
Volume (Year): 39 (2012)
Issue (Month): 4 (October)
Pages: 751-782
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Web page: http://link.springer.de/link/service/journals/00355/index.htm
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Related research
Keywords:Other versions of this item:
- Laurent Simula & Alain Trannoy, 2011. "Shall we Keep the Highly Skilled at Home? The Optimal Income Tax Perspective," CESifo Working Paper Series 3326, CESifo Group Munich.
- H21 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Efficiency; Optimal Taxation
- H31 - Public Economics - - Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents - - - Household
- D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
- F22 - International Economics - - International Factor Movements and International Business - - - International Migration
References
References listed on IDEASPlease report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
- Leite-Monteiro, Manuel, 1997.
"Redistributive policy with labour mobility across countries,"
Journal of Public Economics,
Elsevier, vol. 65(2), pages 229-244, August.
- LEITE MONTEIRO , Manuel, 1994. "Redistributive Policy with Labour Mobility across Countries," CORE Discussion Papers 1994070, Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE).
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