Generalized Social Marginal Welfare Weights for Optimal Tax Theory

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Saez, Emmanuel; Stantcheva, Stefanie
• 署名单位: University of California System; University of California Berkeley; Harvard University
• 刊物名称: AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0002-8282
• DOI: 10.1257/aer.20141362
• 发表日期: 2016
• 页码: 24-45
• 关键词: Income taxation; rates; redistribution; alleviation; fairness; poverty; work

摘要

This paper proposes to evaluate tax reforms by aggregating money metric losses and gains of different individuals using generalized social marginal welfare weights. Optimum tax formulas take the same form as standard welfarist tax formulas by simply substituting standard marginal social welfare weights with those generalized weights. Weights directly capture society's concerns for fairness without being necessarily tied to individual utilities. Suitable weights can help reconcile discrepancies between the welfarist approach and actual tax practice, as well as unify in an operational way the most prominent alternatives to utilitarianism such as Libertarianism, equality of opportunity, or poverty alleviation.