A Quantitative Analysis of Capital Income Taxation

This paper studies the quantitative impact of eliminating capital income taxation on capital accumulation and steady-state welfare in a general equilibrium model with overlapping generations of sixty-five-period-lived individuals who face idiosyncratic earnings risk, borrowing constraints, and life-span uncertainty. Under a wide range of parameter configurations, the capital income tax rate that maximizes steady-state welfare is positive, even though eliminating it completely would raise the steady-state capital stock toward the Golden Rule. This is because the tax burden is shifted toward the younger and liquidity constrained years, reducing the individuals' ability to self-insure. Copyright 1998 by Economics Department of the University of Pennsylvania and the Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association.