Positive and normative judgments implicit in US tax policy, and the costs of unequal growth and recessions

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Lockwood, Benjamin B.; Weinzierl, Matthew
• 署名单位: Harvard University; Harvard University; National Bureau of Economic Research
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF MONETARY ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0304-3932
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jmoneco.2015.10.006
• 发表日期: 2016
• 页码: 30-47
• 关键词: Income taxation; optimal taxation; Inverse optimum

摘要

Calculating the welfare implications of changes to economic policy or shocks requires economists to decide on a normative criterion. One approach is to elicit the relevant moral criteria from real-world policy choices, converting a normative decision into a positive inference, as in the recent surge of inverse-optimum research. We find that capitalizing on the potential of this approach is not as straightforward as we might hope. We perform the inverse-optimum inference on U.S. tax policy from 1979 through 2010 and argue that the results either undermine the normative relevance of the approach or challenge conventional assumptions upon which economists routinely rely when performing welfare evaluations. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.