IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/9412.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Trading with the Unborn: A New Perspective on Capital Income Taxation

Author

Listed:
  • Kent A. Smetters

Abstract

Security markets between generations are incomplete due to a biological trading constraint' that prevents living generations from negotiating contingent contracts with the unborn. This paper shows, however, that government policy can be used to replicate the trades that would have occurred if these generations could trade. Specifically, for the class of linear securities, these trades can be replicated using a Domar-Musgrave capital income tax that is similar to the U.S. capital income tax. It is then proven that the Replicating Tax Rate (RTR) in the replicating capital income tax system is positive in a production economy if wage and capital returns are uncorrelated (i.e., only depreciation is stochastic). The sign of the RTR is ambiguous, however, if wage and capital returns are perfectly correlated (i.e., only productivity is stochastic). But, in this case, if we also assume that (i) production takes the Cobb-Douglas form, (ii) depreciation per period is less than 100 percent, and (iii) the inter-temporal substitution elasticity (IES) is unity, then the RTR is actually negative. Since completing a missing market is not necessarily pareto improving in the presence of general-equilibrium effects, this paper also investigates whether the Replicating Tax increases efficiency. In the case in which the RTR can be signed as negative, efficiency is proven to increase. While this result is one of the first derivations of efficiency gains associated with completing a missing market in a production economy with an endogenous equity return distribution, this result is still restrictive. Simulation evidence, therefore, is reported for more realistic cases in which both productivity and depreciation are stochastic; a calibrated value for the IES parameter is also used and other realistic features of the U.S. economy are incorporated. Welfare results, corresponding to a change in the RTR, are reported for both transition and steady-state generations using a recursive technique that accommodates a state space that expands rapidly over time.

Suggested Citation

  • Kent A. Smetters, 2003. "Trading with the Unborn: A New Perspective on Capital Income Taxation," NBER Working Papers 9412, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:9412
    Note: AG PE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w9412.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Antonio Rangel & Richard Zeckhauser, 2001. "Can Market and Voting Institutions Generate Optimal Intergenerational Risk Sharing?," NBER Chapters, in: Risk Aspects of Investment-Based Social Security Reform, pages 113-152, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Laurence Ball & N. Gregory Mankiw, 2007. "Intergenerational Risk Sharing in the Spirit of Arrow, Debreu, and Rawls, with Applications to Social Security Design," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 115(4), pages 523-547, August.
    3. J. E. Stiglitz, 1969. "The Effects of Income, Wealth, and Capital Gains Taxation on Risk-Taking," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 83(2), pages 263-283.
    4. Hart, Oliver D., 1975. "On the optimality of equilibrium when the market structure is incomplete," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 11(3), pages 418-443, December.
    5. Henning Bohn, 1999. "Should the Social Security Trust Fund Hold Equities," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 2(3), pages 666-697, July.
    6. Allen, Franklin & Gale, Douglas, 1997. "Financial Markets, Intermediaries, and Intertemporal Smoothing," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 105(3), pages 523-546, June.
    7. Roger H. Gordon, 1985. "Taxation of Corporate Capital Income: Tax Revenues Versus Tax Distortions," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 100(1), pages 1-27.
    8. David Bradford, "undated". "Consumption Taxes: Some Fundamental Transition Issues," EPRU Working Paper Series 95-15, Economic Policy Research Unit (EPRU), University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics.
    9. George R. Zodrow, 2019. "Taxation, Uncertainty and the Choice of a Consumption Tax Base," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: George R Zodrow (ed.), TAXATION IN THEORY AND PRACTICE Selected Essays of George R. Zodrow, chapter 8, pages 227-237, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    10. Kent Smetters, 2001. "The Equivalence of the Social Security's Trust Fund Portfolio Allocation and Capital Income Tax Policy," NBER Working Papers 8259, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    11. Wang Yong, 1993. "Stationary Equilibria in an Overlapping Generations Economy with Stochastic Production," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 61(2), pages 423-435, December.
    12. Agnar Sandmo, 1977. "Portfolio Theory, Asset Demand and Taxation: Comparative Statics with Many Assets," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 44(2), pages 369-379.
    13. Evsey D. Domar & Richard A. Musgrave, 1944. "Proportional Income Taxation and Risk-Taking," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 58(3), pages 388-422.
    14. Sandmo, Agnar, 1985. "The effects of taxation on savings and risk taking," Handbook of Public Economics, in: A. J. Auerbach & M. Feldstein (ed.), Handbook of Public Economics, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 5, pages 265-311, Elsevier.
    15. Poterba, James M., 1998. "The rate of return to corporate capital and factor shares: new estimates using revised national income accounts and capital stock data," Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy, Elsevier, vol. 48(1), pages 211-246, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Gottardi, Piero & Kubler, Felix, 2011. "Social security and risk sharing," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 146(3), pages 1078-1106, May.
    2. Olovsson, Conny, 2010. "Quantifying the risk-sharing welfare gains of social security," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 57(3), pages 364-375, April.
    3. Olovsson, Conny, 2004. "Social Security and the Equity Premium Puzzle," Seminar Papers 729, Stockholm University, Institute for International Economic Studies.
    4. Tim Worrall & Alessia Russo & Francesco Lancia, 2017. "Sustainable Intergenerational Insurance," 2017 Meeting Papers 319, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    5. Jeffrey R. Brown & Peter R. Orszag, 2006. "The Political Economy of Government‐Issued Longevity Bonds," Journal of Risk & Insurance, The American Risk and Insurance Association, vol. 73(4), pages 611-631, December.
    6. Olovsson, Conny, 2004. "The Welfare Gains of Improving Risk Sharing in Social Security," Seminar Papers 728, Stockholm University, Institute for International Economic Studies.
    7. Espen Henriksen & Steve Spear, 2006. "Dynamic Suboptimality of Competitive Equilibrium in Multiperiod Overlapping Generations Economies," Computing in Economics and Finance 2006 223, Society for Computational Economics.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Kent Smetters, 2001. "The Equivalence of the Social Security's Trust Fund Portfolio Allocation and Capital Income Tax Policy," NBER Working Papers 8259, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Smetters, Kent, 2006. "Risk sharing across generations without publicly owned equities," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 53(7), pages 1493-1508, October.
    3. Konrad, Kai A., 1989. "Kapitaleinkommensteuern und beschleunigte Abschreibungen bei Unsicherheit," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 47(3), pages 404-427.
    4. Louis Kaplow, 1991. "Taxation and Risk Taking: A General Equilibrium Perspective," NBER Working Papers 3709, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    5. Syed M. Ahsan & Panagiotis Tsigaris, 2009. "The Efficiency Loss of Capital Income Taxation under Imperfect Loss Offset Provisions," Public Finance Review, , vol. 37(6), pages 710-731, November.
    6. Konrad, Kai A., 1991. "The Domar-Musgrave phenomenon and adverse selection," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 7(1), pages 41-53, April.
    7. 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.
    8. Poterba, James M., 2002. "Taxation, risk-taking, and household portfolio behavior," Handbook of Public Economics, in: A. J. Auerbach & M. Feldstein (ed.), Handbook of Public Economics, edition 1, volume 3, chapter 17, pages 1109-1171, Elsevier.
    9. Konrad, Kai A., 1991. "Taxation and risk taking in a capital market equilibrium with self-selection," EconStor Research Reports 112683, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics.
    10. Kai A. Konrad, 1991. "Risk Taking and Taxation in Complete Capital Markets," The Geneva Risk and Insurance Review, Palgrave Macmillan;International Association for the Study of Insurance Economics (The Geneva Association), vol. 16(2), pages 167-177, December.
    11. Robin Boadway & Kevin Spiritus, 2021. "Optimal Taxation of Normal and Excess Returns to Risky Assets," Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers 21-025/VI, Tinbergen Institute.
    12. Sialm, Clemens, 2006. "Stochastic taxation and asset pricing in dynamic general equilibrium," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 30(3), pages 511-540, March.
    13. Dirk Schindler, 2017. "Wealth Taxation, Non-listed Firms, and the Risk of Entrepreneurial Investment," CESifo Working Paper Series 6537, CESifo.
    14. Sims, Theodore S., 2015. "Income taxation, wealth effects, and uncertainty: Portfolio adjustments with isoelastic utility and discrete probability," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 135(C), pages 52-54.
    15. Marc Rapp & Bernhard Schwetzler, "undated". "Asset Prices in the Presence of a Tax Authority," German Working Papers in Law and Economics 2006-1-1167, Berkeley Electronic Press.
    16. George R. Zodrow, 2019. "Taxation, Uncertainty and the Choice of a Consumption Tax Base," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: George R Zodrow (ed.), TAXATION IN THEORY AND PRACTICE Selected Essays of George R. Zodrow, chapter 8, pages 227-237, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    17. Konrad, Kai A., 1990. "A note on depreciation allowances, taxation and risk-taking," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 3(2), pages 161-165.
    18. Bohn, Henning, 2001. "Retirement Savings in an Aging Society: A Case for Innovative Government Debt Management," University of California at Santa Barbara, Economics Working Paper Series qt59r83559, Department of Economics, UC Santa Barbara.
    19. Spencer Bastani & Daniel Waldenström, 2020. "How Should Capital Be Taxed?," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 34(4), pages 812-846, September.
    20. D'Amato, Marcello & Galasso, Vincenzo, 2010. "Political intergenerational risk sharing," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 94(9-10), pages 628-637, October.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D9 - Microeconomics - - Micro-Based Behavioral Economics
    • E6 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook

    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:9412. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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.