Optimal taxation in a habit formation economy

This paper studies habit formation in consumption preferences in a dynamic Mirrlees economy. We derive optimal labor and savings wedges based on a recursive approach. We show that habit formation creates a motive for subsidizing labor supply and savings. In particular, habit formation invalidates the well-known "no distortion at the top" result. We demonstrate that the theoretical findings are quantitatively important: in a parametrized life-cycle model, average labor and savings wedges fall by more than one-third compared with the case of time-separable preferences. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.