Tuesday, April 17, 2007

The Optimal Taxation of Height

Here is the abstract to my new paper, coauthored with Matthew Weinzierl, The Optimal Taxation of Height: A Case Study of Utilitarian Income Redistribution.

Should the income tax system include a tax credit for short taxpayers and a tax surcharge for tall ones? This paper shows that the standard utilitarian framework for tax policy analysis answers this question in the affirmative. This result has two possible interpretations. One interpretation is that individual attributes correlated with wages, such as height, should be considered more widely for determining tax liabilities.
Alternatively, if policies such as a tax on height are rejected, then the standard utilitarian framework must in some way fail to capture our intuitive notions of distributive justice.
Please follow the link above to read the paper. Comments welcome.

By the way, I am 6' 2".