Sunday, November 04, 2007

Incentive Effects of Progressive Taxation at the High End

Does progressive (labor) taxation at the high end reduce the incentive to engage in high-value activities? It seems to me that (to the extent that highly lucrative activities really are high value) it actually increases the incentive. Most of the people with the highest compensation -- movie stars, star athletes, CEOs of large corporations, successful hedge fund managers, successful entrepreneurs, etc. -- have that high compensation not just because of decisions to engage in (ostensibly) high-value activities but because of a combination of an intentional occupational choice decision and unpredictable outcome of success in that occupation. The ones who made the same occupational choices but weren't so successful -- ordinary actors, minor league athletes, middle managers of large corporations, hedge fund managers without a lot of assets under management, entrepreneurs with limited or no success, etc. -- don't get that ultra-high compensation.

How could the tax code encourage people to undertake these activities? If people were risk-neutral, the progressivity wouldn't make much difference, since any increase in taxation of the high rewards for being successful would be offset by a decrease in taxation of the lower rewards of being not-so-successful. But economists usually assume that people are risk-averse. If so, progressive taxation encourages people to enter high-risk, high-value occupations, because it provides a form of insurance for people who choose to do so. If you're successful, you make gobs of money, and you have to pay a lot in taxes, but you still end up with gobs of money; if you're not so successful, you don't make so much money, but you get an insurance payment in the form of a reduced tax bill. If the government were explicitly providing an at-cost insurance policy for actors, athletes, business people, hedge fund managers, and so on, I don't think there would be much question that the policy would encourage, rather than discourage, entry into these occupations.

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20 Comments:

Blogger Gabriel M said...

Wait a second... When you say non-progressive you mean:

30% for non-successful, 30% for successful

and when you mean progressive you mean:

20% for non-successful, 40% for successful

But most people think of progressive as:

30% for non-successful, 40% for successful

But, in the end, I'm not sure these are the right questions. Why should we care about encouraging people to take up one particular job or another? In this about getting tax revenue?

With other-than-lump-sum taxes, someone, somewhere will get the wrong incentives. Add to this the circus that is governmental bureaucracy, and I fail to see the upside.

Sun Nov 04, 03:15:00 AM EST  
Blogger Francisco said...

My view is that most people think in terms of the incentives to earn marginal income, given the chosen activity, rather than the incentives to choose high-earning activities. So progressive taxes discourage Mariah Carey from making another album, not from starting a singing career in the first place.
A slightly more sophisticated thought is that taxes don't affect so much labor or effort, but taxable income. When you raise taxes on the rich, they don't work less, they reduce their tax bill (either by increasing the share of their earnings that is non-taxable, or reducing their tax rate). Given the large number of deductions and loopholes in the tax code, there's plenty of opportunities to do so.

Sun Nov 04, 08:46:00 AM EST  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I think that once you've met "basic needs", including those that might be necessary to adequately keep up with your peer-group Jones (i.e, you're not too embarassed to invite them over to your place), the rest of income is rather irrelevant to whether a person is going to work more or not. Plus, star pay behaves more like a rent on unique human capital than like labour income. So, really, productivity and incentives are non-issues for this select group. The issue boils down then to one of distributive justice, which I know many economists are queasy about discussing. The rich will always try to avoid taxes, no matter what, as long as the exercise brings in more than it costs in accountant fees. The game for government then should be to eliminate the loopholes, so that they can adequately attend to distributive justice.
If we're really concerned about incentives, it is the middle class that we should be looking at. Income taxes for that group could be substantially reduced if all of the negative externalities we're dealing with were adequately taxes with Pigovian taxes. Government needs to shift its focus in taxation.

Mon Nov 05, 10:58:00 AM EST  
Blogger Dan said...

I'm not convinced. One way of simplifying your argument is that people think of careers as prospects, and they are choosing prospects to maximize utility. One prospect, for simplicity, is work with a constant wage; the other is work with some probability of very high success and some probability of failure. Associate U(l) with the risk-free employment and E(U(h)) with risky career.

Then what happens if we implement a progressive tax code? Under a lot of circumstances--but not every circumstance--E(U(h)) will increase because U is concave and we are narrowing the spread between the high- and low-risk options. In this sense, high-risk employment is a more attractive option.

But this does not complete the analysis. If the tax code is progressive, then U(l) will also go up, because (at least relatively speaking) taxes of the lower income have gone down. So on balance we cannot say for sure, even in this highly simplistic model, what the impact will be for sure.

Wed Nov 07, 05:16:00 PM EST  
Blogger Battlepanda said...

Daniel,
Your objection can be overcome (in our little thought experiment) the tax for the average risk-free wage earner stays the same. Presumably that wage is somewhere in between the successful risktaker and the unsuccessful risktaker.

Thu Nov 08, 09:24:00 AM EST  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The experimental data show that the big money goes to people in charge of the money pail. If you raise taxes, they take less. If you lower taxes, they take more. It takes the same amount of work to take a larger sum from the money pail as a lesser sum.

Of course, it takes tax money to fill the money pails. Nations with very low taxes tend not to attract investors. They tend to lack consumers, laws, infrastructure, police forces and the other amenities that make investment attractive.

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