{"title":"储蓄决策对资本税的过度反应","authors":"Kelin Lu","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3880664","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"This paper studies the response of saving decisions to two alternative types of capital taxation, i.e., wealth tax and capital income tax. I conduct a lifecycle experiment using Amazon Mechanical Turk, where subjects make dynamic saving decisions. The subjects exhibit an overreaction to wealth taxes but not to capital income taxes: they save significantly less with introducing a wealth tax than with a financially equivalent decrease in capital returns. Furthermore, I build a parsimonious behavioral model of individual optimization to characterize this misreaction. Finally, I quantitatively illustrate the implication of misreaction bias for optimal capital taxation analysis in an overlapping generations model with the household’s misreaction bias. The results show that a household’s underreaction (overreaction) bias generates a welfare gain (loss) for the economy. The optimal capital tax rate decreases as households exhibit greater overreaction bias and vice versa.","PeriodicalId":176300,"journal":{"name":"Microeconomics: Intertemporal Consumer Choice & Savings eJournal","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"2","resultStr":"{\"title\":\"Overreaction to Capital Taxation in Saving Decisions\",\"authors\":\"Kelin Lu\",\"doi\":\"10.2139/ssrn.3880664\",\"DOIUrl\":null,\"url\":null,\"abstract\":\"This paper studies the response of saving decisions to two alternative types of capital taxation, i.e., wealth tax and capital income tax. I conduct a lifecycle experiment using Amazon Mechanical Turk, where subjects make dynamic saving decisions. The subjects exhibit an overreaction to wealth taxes but not to capital income taxes: they save significantly less with introducing a wealth tax than with a financially equivalent decrease in capital returns. Furthermore, I build a parsimonious behavioral model of individual optimization to characterize this misreaction. Finally, I quantitatively illustrate the implication of misreaction bias for optimal capital taxation analysis in an overlapping generations model with the household’s misreaction bias. The results show that a household’s underreaction (overreaction) bias generates a welfare gain (loss) for the economy. The optimal capital tax rate decreases as households exhibit greater overreaction bias and vice versa.\",\"PeriodicalId\":176300,\"journal\":{\"name\":\"Microeconomics: Intertemporal Consumer Choice & Savings eJournal\",\"volume\":\"1 1\",\"pages\":\"0\"},\"PeriodicalIF\":0.0000,\"publicationDate\":\"2021-09-01\",\"publicationTypes\":\"Journal Article\",\"fieldsOfStudy\":null,\"isOpenAccess\":false,\"openAccessPdf\":\"\",\"citationCount\":\"2\",\"resultStr\":null,\"platform\":\"Semanticscholar\",\"paperid\":null,\"PeriodicalName\":\"Microeconomics: Intertemporal Consumer Choice & Savings eJournal\",\"FirstCategoryId\":\"1085\",\"ListUrlMain\":\"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3880664\",\"RegionNum\":0,\"RegionCategory\":null,\"ArticlePicture\":[],\"TitleCN\":null,\"AbstractTextCN\":null,\"PMCID\":null,\"EPubDate\":\"\",\"PubModel\":\"\",\"JCR\":\"\",\"JCRName\":\"\",\"Score\":null,\"Total\":0}","platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Microeconomics: Intertemporal Consumer Choice & Savings eJournal","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3880664","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
Overreaction to Capital Taxation in Saving Decisions
This paper studies the response of saving decisions to two alternative types of capital taxation, i.e., wealth tax and capital income tax. I conduct a lifecycle experiment using Amazon Mechanical Turk, where subjects make dynamic saving decisions. The subjects exhibit an overreaction to wealth taxes but not to capital income taxes: they save significantly less with introducing a wealth tax than with a financially equivalent decrease in capital returns. Furthermore, I build a parsimonious behavioral model of individual optimization to characterize this misreaction. Finally, I quantitatively illustrate the implication of misreaction bias for optimal capital taxation analysis in an overlapping generations model with the household’s misreaction bias. The results show that a household’s underreaction (overreaction) bias generates a welfare gain (loss) for the economy. The optimal capital tax rate decreases as households exhibit greater overreaction bias and vice versa.