Commodity Taxation and Social Insurance

• Autor(a) principal: Costa, Carlos Eugênio da
• Data de Publicação: 2002
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional do FGV (FGV Repositório Digital)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10438/12146
• topic: Efliciency, Optimal Taxation, Asymmetric and Private Information.; Economia; Seguro social

We investigate optimal commodity taxation in a social insurance framework based on Varian (1980). We show that the tax prescriptions in this moral hazard framework are notably similar to those derive<! from models based on Mirrlees' (1971) self-selection framework. In particular, Atkinson and Stiglitz's (1976) results on uniform commodity taxation are valid in this setup. We incorporate pre-committed goods - those whose consumption must be decided before the resolution of uncertainty - and show that tax prescriptions are also analogous to the existing literature. The robustness of tax rules across these setups is explained by the relaxation of incentive compatibility constraints.