We examine a prominent justification for capital income taxation: goods preferred by those
with high ability ought to be taxed. In an environment where commodity taxes are allowed to …

With heterogeneity in both skills and discount factors, the Atkinson-Stiglitz theorem that
savings should not be taxed does not hold. In a model with heterogeneity of preferences at …

This paper develops a theory of optimal capital taxation that expresses optimal tax formulas
in sufficient statistics. We first consider a simple model with utility functions linear in …

This paper develops a realistic, tractable theoretical model that can be used to investigate
socially-optimal capital taxation. We present a dynamic model of savings and bequests with …

Nonlinear income taxes and linear commodity taxes are analyzed when people differ with
respect to ability, high-skill agents have heterogeneous preferences, and neither individual …

How does wealth taxation differ from capital income taxation? When the return on
investment is equal across individuals, a well-known result is that the two tax systems are …

ABSTRACT A vast theoretical literature in public finance has studied the question of the
desirability of capital taxation. Distinct from questions of the optimality of taxing wealth is …

There is increasing empirical evidence that people systematically differ in their rates of
return on capital. We derive optimal non-linear taxes on labor and capital income in the …

This paper revisits the Atkinson–Stiglitz result on uselessness of commodity taxation in the
presence of optimal non-linear income taxation in a more general setup, namely when …

This paper augments the theory of optimal linear income taxation by taking into account
human capital accumulation as a dimension of labor supply. The distribution of earning …