IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/jpbect/v20y2018i4p455-476.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Subjective well‐being, consumption comparisons, and optimal income taxation

Author

Listed:
  • Sean Slack
  • David Ulph

Abstract

We introduce reference consumption into the standard utility function from optimal tax analysis. Individuals compare their consumption “narrowly” with those of the same productivity, or “broadly” with the average consumption across society. In both narrow and broad equilibria reference consumption is an increasing function of the tax parameters, so generating new theoretical results. Individual well‐being decreases with the net wage (net‐of‐tax) rate for low productivity workers under narrow (broad) comparisons, thus adjusting redistributive taxation considerations. Further, in both cases reference consumption distorts labor supply away from the social optimum level, giving a distortion‐correcting role for taxation.

Suggested Citation

  • Sean Slack & David Ulph, 2018. "Subjective well‐being, consumption comparisons, and optimal income taxation," Journal of Public Economic Theory, Association for Public Economic Theory, vol. 20(4), pages 455-476, August.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:jpbect:v:20:y:2018:i:4:p:455-476
    DOI: 10.1111/jpet.12281
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/jpet.12281
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/jpet.12281?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:jpbect:v:20:y:2018:i:4:p:455-476. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/apettea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.