This paper investigates the optimal income transfer problem at the low end of the income distribution. The government maximizes a social welfare function and faces the traditional equity-efficiency trade-off. The paper models labor supply behavioral responses along the intensive margin (hours or intensity of work on the job) and along the extensive margin (participation in the labor force). Optimal tax formulas are derived as a function of the behavioral elasticities, the shape of the income distribution and the redistribution tastes of the government. When behavioral responses are concentrated along the intensive margin, the optimal transfer program is a classical Negative Income Tax program with a substantial guaranteed income support that is taxed away at high rates. However, when behavioral responses are concentrated along the extensive margin, the optimal transfer program is an Earned Income Credit program with negative marginal tax rates at low income levels and a small guaranteed income. Numerical simulations calibrated with the actual empirical earnings distribution are presented for a range of behavioral elasticities and redistributive tastes of the government. For realistic elasticities, the optimal program provides a moderate guaranteed income, imposes low tax rates on very low annual earnings levels, and then starts phasing out benefits at substantial rates.

Optimal Income Transfer Programs: Intensive Versus Extensive Labor Supply Responses

This paper provides a comprehensive treatment of a basic income maintenance problem for a group of individuals who differ in their income generating abilities. It stresses the impact that imperfect information about such abilities has on programme design. The analysis serves two purposes. First, we are able to unify the theoretical literature on the income maintenance problem. Second, we examine the impact of allowing the government to impose workfare on recipients of income support. In addition to being of policy interest, this is a theoretically challenging problem since it requires solving a multi-dimensional screening problem. The solution that we find is strikingly simple. It separates the poor into two categories, with the lower income groups subject to workfare while facing a 100% marginal tax rate on earnings. The second group does no public work and is offered a benefit schedule which taxes earnings at a lower rate.

The Design of Income Maintenance Programmes

The labor supply and other work incentive effects of welfare programs have long been a central concern in economic research. Work has also been an increasing focus of policy reforms in the USA, culminating with a number of major policy changes in the 1990s whose intent was to increase employment and earnings levels of welfare recipients and other disadvantaged individuals. This chapter reviews the economic research on this topic, covering both the theoretical models that have been developed as well as the empirical findings from econometric studies of the effects of existing welfare programs on labor supply.

Chapter 34 Welfare programs and labor supply

Expanding welfare benefits to include two-parent families has long been considered an option for a public policy designed to strengthen family units. The negative income tax experiments employed this option, and it was found that the experimental group experienced 50 percent higher marital instability than the control group that was eligible for the current set of income-maintenance programs-AFDC and Food Stamps. Marital instability increased even when an experimental plan was no more generous than AFDC for the splitting wife. The conclusion must be either that because of differences in information, stigma, or transaction costs, the experiments produced more powerful independence effects than an equivalent amount of AFDC, or that receiving NIT payments somehow reduced the attractiveness of the married state by calling into question the success of the husband as provider. These findings suggest that, if strengthening marriages is a public-policy objective, two-parent families would be better aided by wage subsidies that reduce the unemployment of family heads and raise the earnings of the family's working members.

Jobs, Cash Transfers, and Marital Instability: A Review and Synthesis of the Evidence.

: The poor receive a sub-optimal amount of material goods through the natural economic processes of our society. Poor and non-poor alike seek to institute mechanisms that give something to the poor beyond what they get from the normal workings of the 'competitive' system. The fact that the non-poor share in this desire indicates that an externality is generated when the economic welfare of the poor is improved. On a collective basis, the non-poor are willing to pay for this externality. They sacrifice some of their income in support of redistributive programs that benefit the poor. In this paper we will not be concerned with moral or ethical values. We develop our analysis with the aid of a simple two-party model. One party is the representative poor man, the other the representative citizen. The representative citizen asks himself the central question of this essay. How should assistance programs to the poor be structured so as to maximize the utility function of the representative citizen. (Author)

Optimal mechanisms for income transfers

Three subsidy schemes for income maintenance are analyzed for their static incentive effects on labor supply. A discussion and critique of regressivity in schemes such as the "income-work" subsidy is offered. The dynamic incentive effects, the costs and benefits, and the redistributive patterns of the schemes are treated with political and social as well as economic considerations. Special attention is devoted to the analysis of a wage subsidy, which has been neglected in the literature on maintenance. The new labor supply is derived for a wage subsidy, and the effect of the wage subsidy in "guaranteeing jobs" and an analogy to the employer subsidy are described. An attempt is made to exploit the static incentive advantages of the wage subsidy over the two income subsidies treated here. The workability of categorical and "self-categorizing" combined wage-and-income subsidy programs is opened for further research.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/144675.pdf

Jonathan Kesselman

Papers

Labor-Supply Effects of Income, Income-Work, and Wage Subsidies.

Incentive Effects of Transfer Systems Once Again