American Economic Journal:
Economic Policy
ISSN 1945-7731 (Print) | ISSN 1945-774X (Online)
Taxation of Couples under Assortative Mating
American Economic Journal: Economic Policy
vol. 6,
no. 3, August 2014
(pp. 155–77)
Abstract
I present a simple and tractable model of the optimal taxation of married couples, working off of the multidimensional screening framework of Armstrong and Rochet (1999). In particular, I study how the tax code varies with the degree of assortative mating. One result is that the "negative jointness" of marginal tax rates found in Kleven, Kreiner, and Saez (2007, 2009) for couples with uncorrelated earnings should be attenuated in the presence of assortative mating. When mating is sufficiently assortative, the optimal tax schedule is separable: an individual's taxes do not depend on his or her spouse's income.Citation
Frankel, Alexander. 2014. "Taxation of Couples under Assortative Mating." American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 6 (3): 155–77. DOI: 10.1257/pol.6.3.155Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- D82 Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
- H21 Taxation and Subsidies: Efficiency; Optimal Taxation
- H24 Personal Income and Other Nonbusiness Taxes and Subsidies; includes inheritance and gift taxes
- J12 Marriage; Marital Dissolution; Family Structure; Domestic Abuse
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