IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/red/sed016/1478.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Taxing Top Incomes

Author

Listed:
  • Christopher Sleet

    (Carnegie Mellon University)

  • Laurence Ales

    (Carnegie Mellon University)

Abstract

We model high income earners as sellers of quality services in a competitive assignment framework. Sellers (high income earners) are differentiated by abil- ity; buyers by their taste for the service. There is assortative matching of buyers and sellers. We show that conventional optimal tax formulas are modified both by a social concern for buyers and an altered mapping of the talent into the income distribution. We quantitatively apply the model to the taxation of CEOs. We find that firm value and CEO income data is consistent with a talent distri- bution that has a thin tail and bounded support and, given sufficient concern for non-CEO firm claimants very low and, perhaps, zero optimal marginal tax on top incomes.

Suggested Citation

  • Christopher Sleet & Laurence Ales, 2016. "Taxing Top Incomes," 2016 Meeting Papers 1478, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    • Handle: RePEc:red:sed016:1478
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Carlos E. da Costa & Lucas J. Maestri, 2019. "Optimal Mirrleesian taxation in non-competitive labor markets," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 68(4), pages 845-886, November.
    2. Dominik Sachs & Aleh Tsyvinski & Nicolas Werquin, 2020. "Nonlinear Tax Incidence and Optimal Taxation in General Equilibrium," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 88(2), pages 469-493, March.
    3. Laurence Ales & Christopher Sleet, 2016. "Taxing Top CEO Incomes," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 106(11), pages 3331-3366, November.
    4. Florian Scheuer & Joel Slemrod, 2020. "Taxation and the Superrich," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 12(1), pages 189-211, August.
    5. Ufuk Akcigit & Douglas Hanley & Stefanie Stantcheva, 2022. "Optimal Taxation and R&D Policies," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 90(2), pages 645-684, March.
    6. Eeckhout, Jan & Fu, Chunyang & Li, Wenjian & Weng, Xi, 2021. "Optimal Taxation and Market Power," CEPR Discussion Papers 16011, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    7. Corneo, Giacomo, 2018. "Time-poor, working, super-rich," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 101(C), pages 1-19.
    8. Guo, Lu & Yan, Chong, 2021. "Optimal Taxation in the Endogenous Growth Framework with the Private Information," MPRA Paper 109548, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    9. Lawson, Nicholas, 2019. "Taxing the job creators: Efficient taxation with bargaining in hierarchical firms," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 56(C), pages 1-25.
    10. Albert Jan Hummel, 2021. "Monopsony Power, Income Taxation and Welfare," CESifo Working Paper Series 9128, CESifo.
    11. Dominik Sachs & Aleh Tsyvinski & Nicolas Werquin, 2016. "A Theory of Asset Prices Based on Heterogeneous Information," Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers 2051, Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University.
    12. Albert Jan Hummel, 2021. "Monopsony power, income taxation and welfare," Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers 21-051/VI, Tinbergen Institute.
    13. Malul, Miki & Rosenboim, Mosi & Shapira, Daniel, 2021. "Are Very High Salaries Necessary for Achieving Economic Efficiency?," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 94(C).
    14. Louis Kaplow, 2022. "Optimal Income Taxation," NBER Working Papers 30199, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

    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:red:sed016:1478. 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: Christian Zimmermann (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/sedddea.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.