Taxation of Couples under Assortative Mating

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Frankel, Alexander
• 署名单位: University of Chicago
• 刊物名称: AMERICAN ECONOMIC JOURNAL-ECONOMIC POLICY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1945-7731
• DOI: 10.1257/pol.6.3.155
• 发表日期: 2014
• 页码: 155-177
• 关键词: Income taxation; INEQUALITY; earnings

摘要

I present a simple and tractable model of the optimal taxation of married couples, working off of the multidimensional screening framework of Armstrong and Rochet (1999). In particular, I study how the tax code varies with the degree of assortative mating. One result is that the negative jointness of marginal tax rates found in Kleven, Kreiner, and Saez (2007, 2009) for couples with uncorrelated earnings should be attenuated in the presence of assortative mating. When mating is sufficiently assortative, the optimal tax schedule is separable: an individual's taxes do not depend on his or her spouse's income.