The CajaCanarias Cabildo Insular de Tenerife Chair of Economics and Mobility at the University of La Laguna is organizing a research seminar entitled “Optimal Tax Policies for Social Mobility: From Theory to Sufficient Statistics» on October 8 at 12:00 pm. The seminar will be given by María Racionero Llorente, a tenured professor at the Research School of Economics, Australian National University, in the Lecture Hall of the Faculty of Economics, Business and Tourism.

María Racionero received the First National Prize, awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Education, upon completing her undergraduate degree. She earned both a master's and a doctorate in Economics from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Her main research area is the economic theory of the public sector, with a particular interest in optimal taxation, pension and education policies, and the financing of higher education. She was the principal investigator of an Australian Research Council Discovery Project on optimal taxation and time allocation. Her work has been published in leading international journals, including the Canadian Journal of Economics, European Economic Review, European Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Public Economic Theory, Labour Economics, Oxford Economic Papers, and Social Choice and Welfare.

In the paper presented at the seminar, co-authored with Pierre Pestieau, the authors study optimal fiscal policy when intergenerational social mobility depends on parental investments in wealth transfers and time spent in education. When time spent in education is not observable, considerations regarding mobility can lead to a positive marginal income tax rate in the upper bracket, along with a marginal subsidy for wealth transfers. They explore a statistically sound interpretation of these results, linking optimal marginal incentives to intergenerational transition probabilities, the sensitivity of mobility to parental investments, and the social value of changes in population composition.