Since the progressivity of the sales tax is difficult to directly measure, this paper introduces an indirect approach combining simulated household income with realizations of consumption behavior from survey data.
In an economy with heterogeneous firms and heterogeneous consumers, the authors describe a general equilibrium where firm equity is priced by a supply and demand process. With a model robust to arbitrary, nonlinear tax functions, they investigate the efficiency of replacing the current U.S. tax regime with a policy of no corporate taxes and taxation of capital distributions to the household at progressive personal income tax rates.