IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ctl/louvre/1991044.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

On the Diferrence between Income and Consumption Taxes when the Return to Savings is uncertain

Author

Listed:
  • Wolfram F. RICHTER

    (University of Dortmund)

  • Wolfgang WIEGARD

    (University of Regensburg)

Abstract

The taxation of income is usually criticized for the efficiency loss that results from distorting the intertemporal consumption decision. This argument is rejected in a world where the return to savings is random. It is shown that a distorting marginal tax on uncertain interest income serves as partial insurance and that this effect outweighs the efficiency loss, if only the first marginal dollar in tax revenue is valued less elastically than the last dollar spent on private consumption. A consumption tax - even one with intertemporally differentiated rates - would not provide insurance under these circumstances. The explicit consideration of uncertainty thus gives support to taxes that allow differentiation between the safe wi thdrawal of savings and the random return thereon.

Suggested Citation

  • Wolfram F. RICHTER & Wolfgang WIEGARD, 1991. "On the Diferrence between Income and Consumption Taxes when the Return to Savings is uncertain," Discussion Papers (REL - Recherches Economiques de Louvain) 1991044, Université catholique de Louvain, Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales (IRES).
  • Handle: RePEc:ctl:louvre:1991044
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40723968
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Syed Ahsan & Peter Tsigaris, 1998. "The design of a consumption tax under capital risk," Journal of Economics, Springer, vol. 68(1), pages 53-78, February.
    2. Stefan Bach, 2016. "Erbschaftsteuer, Vermögensteuer oder Kapitaleinkommensteuer: Wie sollen hohe Vermögen stärker besteuert werden?," Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin 1619, DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research.
    3. Wolfram Richter, 1992. "The optimal taxation of risky capital income: An elasticity rule," Journal of Economics, Springer, vol. 55(1), pages 101-111, February.
    4. Schindler, Dirk, 2003. "Optimal Income Taxation with a Risky Asset: The Triple Income Tax," CoFE Discussion Papers 03/11, University of Konstanz, Center of Finance and Econometrics (CoFE).
    5. Dirk Schindler, 2008. "Taxing Risky Capital Income - A Commodity Taxation Approach," FinanzArchiv: Public Finance Analysis, Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, vol. 64(3), pages 311-333, September.
    6. Syed M. Ahsan & Panagiotis Tsigaris, 2003. "Choice of Tax Base Revisited: Cash Flow vs. Prepayment Approaches to Consumption Taxation," CESifo Working Paper Series 983, CESifo.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ctl:louvre:1991044. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sebastien SCHILLINGS (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/iruclbe.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.