The Undesirability of Randomized Income Taxation under Decreasing Risk Aversion

Publication Type  Preprints
Author  Martin Hellwig
Year of Publication  2005
Issue  2005/27
Abstract  For the standard specification of the utilitarian optimal income tax problem with hidden characteristics, the paper shows that randomized tax schemes are undesirable if preferences exhibit a property of weakly decreasing risk aversion according to the multidimensional risk aversion concept of Hellwig (2004). The property of decreasing risk aversion also implies uniqueness of the optimal income tax schedule and continuity in cases where the type distribution has a continuous density.
Publisher  Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods
Place Published  Bonn
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Published in:  Journal of Public Economics, vol. 91, no. 3-4, pp. 791-816, 2007
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Keywords  Optimal Income Taxation, Randomized Incentive Schemes, Nonincreasing Risk Aversion
JEL-Code  H21