Title
Shall we keep the highly skilled at home? The optimal income tax perspective
Abstract
We examine how allowing individuals to emigrate to pay lower taxes abroad changes the optimal non-linear income tax scheme in a Mirrleesian economy. An individual emigrates if his domestic utility is less than his utility abroad net of migration costs, utilities and costs both depending on productivity. Three average social criteria are distinguished—national, citizen and resident—according to the agents whose welfare matters. A curse of the middle-skilled occurs in the first-best, and it may be optimal to let some highly skilled leave the country under the resident criterion. In the second-best, under the Citizen and Resident criteria, preventing emigration of the highly skilled is not necessarily optimal because the interaction between the incentive-compatibility and participations constraints may cause countervailing incentives. In important cases, a Rawlsian policymaker should decrease top marginal tax rates to keep everyone at home.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1007/s00355-011-0552-3
Social Choice and Welfare
Keywords
Field
DocType
incentive compatibility,emigration,participation constraints,migration,social sciences,income tax
Economics,Indirect tax,Income tax,Ad valorem tax,Double taxation,State income tax,Tax reform,Labour economics,Value-added tax,Gross income
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
39
4
1432-217X
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
3
1.07
2
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
laurent simula172.36
Alain Trannoy2318.69