Tax buyouts

Marco Del Negro, Fabrizio Perri, Fabiano Schivardi

NBER Working Paper No. 15847
Issued in March 2010
NBER Program(s):Economic Fluctuations and Growth Program, Public Economics Program

The paper studies a fiscal policy instrument that can reduce fiscal distortions without affecting revenues, in a politically viable way. The instrument is a private contract (tax buyout), offered by the government to each citizen, whereby the citizen can choose to pay a fixed price in exchange for a given reduction in her tax rate for a period of time. We introduce the tax buyout in a dynamic overlapping generations economy, calibrated to match several features of the US income, taxes and wealth distributions. Under simple pricing, the introduction of the buyout is revenue neutral but, by reducing distortions, it benefits a significant fraction of the population and leads to sizable increases in aggregate labor supply, income and consumption.

Acknowledgments

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Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w15847

Published: Del Negro, Marco & Perri, Fabrizio & Schivardi, Fabiano, 2010. "Tax buyouts," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 57(5), pages 576-595, July. citation courtesy of

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