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WiSo PhD student wins Musgrave Prize

This year, Jonas Löbbing has won the prestigious IIPF prize.

[This content is not available in "Englisch" yet] Jonas Löbbing

Jonas Löbbing, PhD student at the Center for Macroeconomic Research, was awarded the Peggy and Richard Musgrave Prize for his paper “Redistributive Income Taxation with Directed Technical Change” at this year’s annual congress of the International Institute for Public Finance (IIPF). The Peggy and Richard Musgrave Prize is awarded for the best paper by authors under 40 years of age presented at the IIPF congress. The annual IIPF congress is one of the biggest conferences in the field of public economics in the world.

In his paper, Jonas connects the theory of directed technical change with the theory of optimal taxation. He shows that for a broad class of social welfare functions, accounting for central predictions of the theory of directed technical change makes progressive income tax reforms more attractive from a welfare perspective. The optimal tax hence becomes more progressive, that is, it features lower marginal tax rates at low incomes and higher marginal tax rates at high incomes, when accounting for the contingencies of directed technical change theory.

• Peggy and Richard Musgrave Prize 2019 (IIPF)

• Award-winning work of Jonas Löbbing: "Redistributive Income Taxation with Directed Technical Change"