IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/28006.html

How Should Tax Progressivity Respond to Rising Income Inequality?

Author

Listed:
  • Jonathan Heathcote
  • Kjetil Storesletten
  • Giovanni L. Violante

Abstract

We address this question in a heterogeneous-agent incomplete-markets model featuring exogenous idiosyncratic risk, endogenous skill investment, and flexible labor supply. The tax and transfer schedule is restricted to be log-linear in income, a good description of the US system. Rising inequality is modeled as a combination of skill-biased technical change and growth in residual wage dispersion. When facing shifts in the income distribution like those observed in the US, a utilitarian planner chooses higher progressivity in response to larger residual inequality but lower progressivity in response to widening skill price dispersion reflecting technical change. Overall, optimal progressivity is approximately unchanged between 1980 and 2016. We document that the progressivity of the actual US tax and transfer system has similarly changed little since 1980, in line with the model prescription.

Suggested Citation

  • Jonathan Heathcote & Kjetil Storesletten & Giovanni L. Violante, 2020. "How Should Tax Progressivity Respond to Rising Income Inequality?," NBER Working Papers 28006, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:28006
    Note: EFG PE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w28006.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Ferey, Antoine & Haufler, Andreas & Perroni, Carlo, 2023. "Incentives, globalization, and redistribution," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 224(C).
    2. Jalles, João Tovar & Karras, Georgios, 2024. "Tax progressivity and income inequality in the US," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 238(C).
    3. Jeong, Minhyeon & Jung, Euiyoung & Lee, Chul-In, 2024. "Comovement of labor supply and human capital investment in policy analysis," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 245(C).
    4. Jang, Youngsoo, 2021. "Democracy or Optimal Policy: Income Tax Decisions without Commitment," MPRA Paper 110475, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    5. Jonas Loebbing, 2023. "Redistributive Income Taxation with Directed Technical Change," Rationality and Competition Discussion Paper Series 420, CRC TRR 190 Rationality and Competition.
    6. Juan‐Carlos Cordoba & Marla Ripoll & Siqiang Yang, 2024. "The Full Recession: Private Versus Social Costs Of Covid‐19," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 65(1), pages 547-582, February.
    7. Erik Hurst & Patrick J. Kehoe & Elena Pastorino & Thomas Winberry, 2022. "The Distributional Impact of the Minimum Wage in the Short and Long Run," Staff Report 640, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
    8. Jonas Loebbing, 2020. "Redistributive Income Taxation with Directed Technical Change," CESifo Working Paper Series 8743, CESifo.
    9. James Bullard & Aarti Singh & Jacek Suda, 2024. "Optimal Macroeconomic Policies in a Heterogeneous World," IMF Economic Review, Palgrave Macmillan;International Monetary Fund, vol. 72(3), pages 991-1041, September.
    10. Darapheak Tin & Chung Tran & Nabeeh Zakariyya, 2025. "The Evolution of the Earnings Distribution in a Sustained Growth Economy: Evidence from Australia," ANU Working Papers in Economics and Econometrics 2025-704, Australian National University, College of Business and Economics, School of Economics.
    11. Bahn, Dorothée & Bredemeier, Christian & Juessen, Falko, 2025. "Household chores, taxes, and the labor-supply elasticities of women and men," Ruhr Economic Papers 1177, RWI - Leibniz-Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, Ruhr-University Bochum, TU Dortmund University, University of Duisburg-Essen.
    12. Maria Coelho & Aieshwarya Davis & Alexander Klemm & Carolina Osorio-Buitron, 2024. "Gendered taxes: the interaction of tax policy with gender equality," International Tax and Public Finance, Springer;International Institute of Public Finance, vol. 31(5), pages 1413-1460, October.
    13. Sandro Ambuehl & Sebastian Blesse & Philipp Doerrenberg & Christoph Feldhaus & Axel Ockenfels, 2023. "Politicians’ Social Welfare Criteria – An Experiment with German Legislators," ifo Working Paper Series 391, ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich.
    14. Martin F. Hellwig, 2021. "Social Choice in Large Populations with Single-Peaked Preferences," Discussion Paper Series of the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Economics 2021_18, Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Economics.
    15. João Tovar Jalles & Georgios Karras, 2023. "Tax Progressivity and Output: Evidence from OECD countries," Working Papers REM 2023/0293, ISEG - Lisbon School of Economics and Management, REM, Universidade de Lisboa.
    16. David W. Berger & Kyle F. Herkenhoff & Simon Mongey, 2022. "Minimum Wages, Efficiency and Welfare," NBER Working Papers 29662, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    17. Alessandra Pizzo, 2023. "The welfare effects of tax progressivity with frictional labor markets," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 49, pages 123-146, July.
    18. Johannes König, 2023. "Bias in Tax Progressivity Estimates," National Tax Journal, University of Chicago Press, vol. 76(2), pages 267-289.
    19. Youngsoo Jang & Takeki Sunakawa & Minchul Yum, 2023. "Tax‐and‐transfer progressivity and business cycles," Quantitative Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 14(4), pages 1367-1400, November.
    20. Zuobao Wang & Tianrun Lin & Yao Chen & Shurui Zhang, 2025. "Is it Actually Working Well? A Comparative Study of the Redistributive Effectiveness of Public Social Benefits in 33 Countries," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 179(1), pages 235-267, August.
    21. Jang, Youngsoo, 2021. "Democracy or Optimal Policy: Income Tax Decisions without Commitment," MPRA Paper 110466, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    22. Brendler, Pavel, 2023. "Rising earnings inequality and optimal income tax and social security policies," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 134(C), pages 35-52.
    23. Artige, Lionel & Cavenaile, Laurent, 2023. "Public education expenditures, growth and income inequality," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 209(C).

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • E24 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Employment; Unemployment; Wages; Intergenerational Income Distribution; Aggregate Human Capital; Aggregate Labor Productivity
    • H21 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Efficiency; Optimal Taxation
    • J24 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity
    • J3 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs
    • J31 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - Wage Level and Structure; Wage Differentials

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:nbr:nberwo:28006. 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: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.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.