IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/red/sed019/1278.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Wealth Taxation and Life Expectancy

Author

Listed:
  • Antonio Bellofatto

    (University of Queensland)

Abstract

I study the optimal taxation of wealth in a dynastic economy with heterogeneous mortality risk, and various sources of wealth accumulation (including savings and bequests). Working individuals are indexed by skills which are private information. Skills not only determine earning abilities but also correlate with survival probability, so that more productive agents on average live longer. My analysis points to the longevity gradient as a crucial determinant for optimal wealth taxation, both from a theoretical and from a quantitative angle. In particular, due to longevity variations, savings should be marginally taxed in expectation, while bequests received early in life should be marginally subsidized on average. When calibrated to U.S. data, such forces are commensurate with the actual levels of wealth taxation in a sample of developed countries.

Suggested Citation

  • Antonio Bellofatto, 2019. "Wealth Taxation and Life Expectancy," 2019 Meeting Papers 1278, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    • Handle: RePEc:red:sed019:1278
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://red-files-public.s3.amazonaws.com/meetpapers/2019/paper_1278.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Roozbeh Hosseini & Ali Shourideh, 2019. "Retirement Financing: An Optimal Reform Approach," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 87(4), pages 1205-1265, July.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:red:sed019:1278. 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: Christian Zimmermann (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/sedddea.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.