besteuerung und risikokapital: eine allgemeine gleichgewichtsanalyse

abstract: the paper concerns taxation and risk taking in a general equilibrium setting. the model is about an economy where a single physical good is produced in two different sectors. one sector is subject to multiplicative technological uncertainty whereas the other sector employs a deterministic production technology. firms issue real equities that represent claims on their output. the number of equities issued by the firms is equal to the units of expected output. the only way that households can acquire the consumption good is by acquiring real equities of the firms. since the output of one sector is uncertain the real equities of that sector are risky assets. hence, households which are assumed to be risk averse in consumption, choose between safe and risky assets in order to optimize their consumption risk. firms are assumed to minimize the costs of producing that level of expected output and, thus, of producing that number of real equities that is necessary to satisfy consumerdemand for assets. it turns out that the uncertainty model is identical in its formal structure to the standard model of tax incidence under certainty if one substitutes asset demand functions for the demand functions for different goods. hence, theformal results are the same as those of tax incidence theory under certainty. there is, however, a new element of taxation. in addition to the taxation of factor income or the taxation of asset purchases, it is possible to tax asset returns. as in the certainty model it turns out that an income tax with full loss offsets that taxes the returns of the equities after the realization of the production risk, increases the share of the risky assets in consumer portfolios. this means that relatively more of the good is produced in the risky sector of the economy. whether labor or capital bears the burden of the tax depends on the relative factor intensities in the two sectors.;