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This paper incorporates corruption in the tax administration in a Mirrleesian model of optimal income taxation. In a multi-type setting with a discrete ability distribution, we show that the marginal tax structure can be designed to fully offset the incentives to evade taxes. The optimal marginal tax rates reflect two key determinants: the welfare weight the government attaches to each ability type, and how the private cost of tax evasion varies across the income distribution. We also extend the analysis by examining how public expenditures on tax enforcement can serve as a complementary instrument.

This paper incorporates labor market inactivity and long-term unemployment into the framework of optimal redistributive taxation. We examine how a combination of education policy, public employment programs, unemployment benefits, and optimal income taxation can effectively address both redistributive goals and the persistent challenges of long-term unemployment. Our analysis shows that the second-best optimal policy typically implies overprovision of education compared with a policy rule that reflects only direct marginal benefits and costs. At the same time, public employment programs and unemployment benefits tend to be underprovided. Using numerical simulations, we illustrate how this policy mix adapts to varying preferences for redistribution, productivity disparities, and the proportion of individuals at risk of long-term unemployment.

This article analyses optimal taxation when (1) a fraction of people has positional preferences, and (2) concerns for relative consumption and preferences for equality are operative simultaneously. We show that incentive compatibility motivates a regressive marginal tax structure, which in the end implies that people with positional preferences are taxed at a lower marginal rate than people without such preferences. A counteracting mechanism arises if those who are not concerned with their relative consumption have preferences for income-equality, even if people with positional preferences should still be taxed at a lower marginal rate than motivated by their contributions to externalities.

This paper analyzes optimal redistributive charitable giving in a Mirrleesian framework. The status motive behind charity, the stigma from receiving donations, and transaction costs all work to decrease the optimal marginal subsidies on redistributive charity. Because the existing empirical evidence of these effects (when available) is highly uncertain and context-dependent, the range of possible outcomes is large, and even includes the possibility that charitable giving should be taxed rather than subsidized. In a natural benchmark case, the optimal tax treatment of charitable giving is consistent with a simple tax credit, whereas pure tax deductions are never part of the optimal policy.

This paper develops a maximum likelihood (ML) bunching estimator of the elasticity of taxable income (ETI). Our structural approach provides a natural framework to simultaneously account for unobserved preference heterogeneity and optimization errors and for measuring their relative importance. We characterize the conditions under which the parameters of the model are identified and show that the ML estimator performs well in terms of bias and precision. The paper also contains an empirical application using Swedish data, showing that both the ETI and the standard deviation of the optimization friction are precisely estimated, albeit relatively small.

This paper analyzes optimal taxation of charitable giving to a public good in a Mirrleesianframework with social comparisons. When there are no transaction costs of giving, charitablegiving should be subsidized to such an extent that government contributions are completelycrowded out, regardless of whether the government is welfarist or non-welfarist, in whichcase it does not acknowledge the warm glow of giving. Under welfarism, stronger concernsfor relative charitable giving support lower marginal subsidies, whereas relative consumptionconcerns work in the opposite direction. We also show that a simple flat-rate subsidy isoptimal under welfarism, while the marginal subsidy increases in income under nonwelfarism.

A substantial body of empirical and theoretical research suggests that individuals care about, and derive instrumental benefits from, their rank in society. This paper extends the Mirrleesian model of optimal income taxation to a framework where individuals derive utility from their perceived ability rank. Such concerns generate externalities that tend to increase the optimal marginal tax rates for both corrective and redistributive reasons. While empirical evidence on the magnitude of these concerns is limited, their potential impact on optimal income taxation could be substantial, with top marginal income tax rates potentially exceeding 90%.

In this paper, we consider how the hours of work and retirement age ought to respond to a change in the uncertainty of the length of life. The results show that a decrease in the standard deviation of life-length leads to an increase in the socially optimal retirement age and a decrease in the hours of work per period spent working, if the preferences for the number of years spent in retirement are characterized by constant or decreasing absolute risk version. We also show how a benevolent policy maker can implement the social optimum through an actuarially fair pension policy.

This paper is the first to integrate corruption with respect to tax collection in a Mirrleesian model of optimal redistributive taxation. The analysis starts with a simple two-type model, showing that the optimal marginal tax structure resembles that of the original Stiglitz (1982) model, albeit for different reasons. We also extend the analysis to a framework with many types and present policy rules for marginal taxation over the whole ability distribution. The marginal income tax rates are all non-negative and can be expressed in terms of two key determinants: the distributional weights attached to taxpayers, and how the private cost to evade taxes varies with the taxpayers' income. Finally, we consider the role of government expenditures directly targeting the incentives of the tax collector, such that these public expenditures and the optimal tax structure are implemented simultaneously.