James A. Mirrlees

Categories: Finance,

An economist who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1996, along with William Vickrey, for his work on information asymmetry as it relates to taxation and moral hazard problems. Mirrlees believes that the tax system should be used to improve equality, and determined that the optimal marginal tax rate should be only about 20%. Furthermore, he determined that this optimal rate could efficiently be applied to everyone, not just the rich, providing justification for a flat tax rate.