Existing research on optimal taxation in economies with status-driven relative consumption (implicitly) assumes that there is no involuntary unemployment, despite ample evidence that real world labor markets are typically characterized by such unemployment. We show how the marginal tax policy ought to be modified to simultaneously account for positional consumption externalities and equilibrium unemployment, and find that interaction effects between these two market failures are crucial determinants of the marginal tax structure. In certain cases, the policy incentive to tax away positional externalities vanishes completely, and negative positional externalities may even lead to lower marginal taxation, under involuntary unemployment.

尽管有充分的证据表明现实世界的劳动力市场通常以这种失业为特征，但对具有地位驱动的相对消费（隐含）的经济体中最优税收的现有研究假设不存在非自愿失业。我们展示了如何修改边际税收政策以同时考虑位置消费外部性和均衡失业，并发现这两个市场失灵之间的相互作用是边际税收结构的关键决定因素。在某些情况下，对位置外部性征税的政策激励完全消失，负的位置外部性甚至可能导致在非自愿失业的情况下降低边际税收。