Optimal Tax Reform and Public-Sector Investment in Human Capital

This paper evaluates the efficiency implications of various fundamental tax reforms in an infinite-horizon endogenous growth model with public-sector investment in human capital. A fully optimal reform requires the government to adjust its expenditures on education, training, or R&D to take into account the tax incentives that are put in place to encourage private investment in these areas. So-called "revenue neutral" reforms (which address tax incentives but not public expenditures) can thus bring about a suboptimal mix of public and private investment in human capital. In quantitative simulations, we find that the appropriate size of government can be quite important for efficiency and that reforms which ignore this idea by maintaining public expenditures at pre-reform levels can miss out on a large portion of the available welfare gains from moving to a consumption-based tax system