工作论文不方便传阅,先把文章思路梳理如下:
作者首先回顾了前人的文献“It is commonly suggested in economics textbooks that indirect taxation or market power results in social welfare loss, called “deadweight loss” or “excess burden”, because they distorts the market prices faced by consumers. The magnitudes of the losses depend on the slopes of the demand curves of consumers and supply curves (or marginal cost curves) of firms. ”(Ramsey, 1927; Hotelling, 1938; Baumol and Bradford, 1970; Diamond, 1975; Myles, 1989;
and others).
Atkinson and Stiglitz (1972) suggest that the conventional theories on indirect taxation be unsatisfactory because they are based on restrictive assumptions including the absence of income effects and the independence of demand functions.
然后,给出了一些假设:“This paper reconsiders the old topic of optimal indirect taxation. The model resembles that of Atkinson and Stiglitz (1972) but is more general. Assume that all commodities are taxable but “leisure” is not. Firms may have market power. There is no transaction cost, ”
然后,利用一般均衡求解和比较first best、征税、不征税各情形。
其结论是:The social optimal resource allocation can be attained through indirect taxation.
The optimal taxation equalizes the after-tax Lerner indexes of all commodities.
The optimal indirect taxation results in welfare gain rather than loss.