Faculty Sponsor: Omer Koru
Live Poster Session: Zoom Link Goes Here
Tamiraa Sanjaajav
Tamiraa Sanjaajav is a Computer Science and Economics major from Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. She is currently interested in studying the economic effects of different political and taxation systems. In her free time, she enjoys taking walks, trying different sports, and writing.
Abstract: This research investigates the optimal design of city-level progressive taxation in the presence of migration, congestion, and heterogeneous returns to experience. While large cities offer significant agglomeration externalities, they also face higher congestion costs and exhibit thicker Pareto tails in their income distributions. This project develops a structural model where individual skill growth is endogenously linked to city size, leading to city-specific income distributions. The central hypothesis is that progressive taxation can serve as a coordination mechanism: by lowering the net cost of living for young, low-experienced workers, cities can incentivize the migration of “high-growth” individuals. This expansion of the labor pool enhances productivity for all residents—including high-skilled individuals—through intensified agglomeration economies. The project has two parts: to provide evidence on unequal distribution of benefits and to develop a structural model to analyze optimal city-level tax.
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