Essays in optimal taxation

Official URL: http://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b2297027 (Table of contents)

The mismatch between wealth level and entrepreneurial ability creates productive inefficiency in the market and under financial frictions, the credit market may not be able to solve this problem. In such a world, decreasing wealth inequality with capital taxation might be helpful in bringing the economy to its production possibilities frontier but capital taxation is costly as it distorts wealth creation. I derive optimal capital tax formulas that reflect this trade-off between productive efficiency benefit and wealth accumulation cost of capital taxes. With numerical analysis, I show that when the mismatch is high, government tends to intervene in the economy more and optimal capital taxes are higher. Also, having a lower elasticity of labor with respect to wage for agents leads to higher optimal taxation rate.