We analyze optimal taxation of labor and capital income in a life-cycle framework with idiosyncratic income risk. We … provide a novel decomposition of labor income tax formulas into a redistribution and an insurance component. The latter is … independent of the social welfare function and determined by the degree of income risk and risk aversion. The optimal linear …

can get an estimate of the taxable income elasticity from the bunching pattern around a kink point. The bunching estimator … cannot identify the taxable income elasticity when the functional form of the distribution of preference heterogeneity is … unknown. We find that an observed distribution of taxable income around a kink point in a budget set can be consistent with …