Assuming the government cannot fully observe either individual types or incomes and jointly picks optimal taxes and audit policies against evasion can significantly alter standard results from optimal income taxation and tax-evasion models, which treat these separately. We consider this when individuals differ in their risk preferences and incomes. Given the resulting complexity, supplementing analytic results with numerical analysis helps explain the structure of the resulting policies and how they change when the distribution of income or the revenue requirements of the government change. We do this analysis with and without audit errors and with incomes exogenous or affected by occupational choice.
Among the rationales for social security, there is the fact that some people have to be forced to save. To explain undersaving, rational prodigality and hyperbolic preferences are often cited but treated separably. In this paper we study those two particular behaviors that lead to forced saving within an optimal income tax second-best setting.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.