Estate and Capital Gains Taxation: Efficiency and Political Economy Considerations

In this paper a simple dynastic overlapping-generations model with homogeneous agents is used to analy ze the optimal use of capital in- come tax, labor income tax and estate tax. The results of this analysis add to the conventional wisdom about capital income taxation: while it is true that in the long run the estate tax rate should be set to zero, it is also true that other capital income taxation is a usable policy tool even in the steady state. The other contribution of the paper is the building of a simple dynamic political economy model where the structure of capital taxes is determined. In a median-voter framework with no policy commitment, estate taxation is used too heavily as a capital-tax-revenue-collecting tool relative to the second-best optimum for the social planner.