We quantify marginal excess burden, dened as the change in deadweight loss for an additional dollar of tax revenue, for dierent taxes. We use a dynamic general equilibrium, overlapping generations model featured with heterogeneous agents and a realistic structure of corporate nance and taxes. Our main results, based on an economy calibrated to Australian data, indicate that company taxes are more distorting than personal income and consumption taxes. Specically, the marginal excess burden for the company income tax is 83 cents per dollar of tax revenue raised, compared to 34 cents and 24 cents for the personal income and consumption taxes, respectively. A broader analysis of more tax instruments conrm that the relatively larger excess burden of company taxes ultimately falls on households. Importantly, the marginal excess burden is distributed unevenly across skill types, generations and ages. This highlights political challenges when obtaining popular support for raising taxes. Hence, our analysis demonstrates that marginal excess burden can be an useful tool for evaluating both eciency and distributional implications of a tax increase at the margin.
We quantify marginal excess burden, dened as the change in deadweight loss for an additional dollar of tax revenue, for dierent taxes. We use a dynamic general equilibrium, overlapping generations model featured with heterogeneous agents and a realistic structure of corporate nance and taxes. Our main results, based on an economy calibrated to Australian data, indicate that company taxes are more distorting than personal income and consumption taxes. Specically, the marginal excess burden for the company income tax is 83 cents per dollar of tax revenue raised, compared to 34 cents and 24 cents for the personal income and consumption taxes, respectively. A broader analysis of more tax instruments conrm that the relatively larger excess burden of company taxes ultimately falls on households. Importantly, the marginal excess burden is distributed unevenly across skill types, generations and ages. This highlights political challenges when obtaining popular support for raising taxes. Hence, our analysis demonstrates that marginal excess burden can be an useful tool for evaluating both eciency and distributional implications of a tax increase at the margin.
We study the incidence of capital income taxation in a dynamic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous rms and lifecycle households. In this incomplete market setting, marginal excess burdens of three capital taxes, namely corporate income, dividend and capital gains taxes, are vastly dierent due to heterogeneous responses of rms and households, and heterogeneous eects of general equilibrium adjustments. It is indeed important to account for rm heterogeneity in productivity and investment nancing as well as household heterogeneity in age and skill. Overall, taxing capital with a corporate income tax at the rm level results in higher excess burden than taxing capital with dividend and capital gains taxes at the household level. Given the existing U.S. tax treatment for capital income, reforms that shift tax burden from the rm to household side potentially result in eciency gains and overall welfare improving. However, the welfare benets of the tax reforms are quite dierent across households and generations over transition time, depending on skill, age-cohort and budget balancing tax instruments. In particular, majority of currently alive households, especially retirees, experience welfare gains under moderate corporate income tax cuts, but suer from welfare losses under more radical tax cuts.
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