Transfers and bequests: a portfolio analysis in a Nash game

This paper develops a two-stage non-cooperative Nash game framework of parental–children interactions to explain the equal division puzzle in bequests. In the analysis, a portfolio approach is adopted for characterizing how altruistic parents allocate their inheritable wealth between inter-vivos transfers and post-mortem bequests. The model includes elements of strategic altruism, exchange of family-specific merit goods, transfer-seeking behavior by competing siblings, and parents’ “post-mortem reputation” in bequest division. Allowing for children’s heterogeneity and interactions, we find that inter-vivos transfers are unevenly distributed between the children, despite an equal degree of parental altruism. Moreover, we show the compatibility of unequal inter-vivos transfers and equal bequests, regardless of earnings differentials across children.      

The Effectiveness of Consumption Taxes and Transfers as Insurance Against Idiosyncratic Risk

We quantitatively evaluate the effectiveness of a consumption tax and lump-sum transfer program as insurance against idiosyncratic earnings risk. We use a heterogeneous agent, incomplete markets model in which households adjust savings and employment in each period in the presence of idiosyncratic productivity risk and a borrowing constraint. The model is calibrated to the U.S. economy. We find a weak insurance effect of the consumption tax and transfer program. Expanding the tax and transfer program from the current U.S. level increases the capital-output ratio and reduces the interest rate. Consumption inequality also decreases only slightly.     

The Impact of Oportunidades on Consumption,Savings and Transfers*

In this paper, we estimate the effect of the Mexican conditional cash transfer programme, Oportunidades, on transfers, savings and consumption for treated households. We find positive effects on consumption of non‐durable and durable goods, an increase in savings coupled with a drop in the number and values of loans, and a reduction of in‐kind transfers received by households in treatment areas. These results are consistent with the existing evidence that conditional cash transfer programmes have beneficial effects in both the short and medium term, but that they partly crowd out private transfers.     

The Elasticity of Taxable Income in New Zealand*

This paper reports estimates of the elasticity of taxable income with respect to the net‐of‐tax rate for New Zealand taxpayers. The relative stability of the New Zealand personal income tax system, in terms of marginal rates, thresholds and the tax base, provides helpful conditions for deriving these estimates. The elasticity of taxable income was estimated to be substantially higher for the highest income groups. Changes in the timing of income flows for the higher income recipients were found to be an important response to the announcement of a new higher rate bracket. The marginal welfare costs of personal income taxation were consistent across years, being relatively small for all but the higher tax brackets. For the top marginal rate bracket of 39 per cent, the welfare cost of raising an extra dollar of tax revenue was estimated to be well in excess of a dollar. Implications of the findings are that: disincentive effects of high top marginal rates can be substantial even when labour supply responses are small; the welfare costs of increases in top marginal tax rates can be high; and announcement effects of tax policy changes can lead to considerable income shifting between time periods.     

Borrowing Constraints,Home Ownership and Housing Choice: Evidence from Intra‐Family Wealth Transfers

We study the impact of borrowing constraints on home ownership and housing demand by comparing the tenure choice and housing quality of consumers who receive intra‐family wealth transfers to those that do not. Our analysis is based on household‐level panel data providing information on the receipt of wealth transfers, changes in tenure status as well as changes in the size and quality of housing. On average we find that the receipt of a wealth transfer increases the propensity of consumers to transition from renters to home‐owners by 6–8 percentage points (35% of the sample mean). Additional analyses suggest that this effect is unlikely to be driven by wealth effects and can thus be attributed to the relaxation of borrowing constraints. By contrast, wealth transfers do not increase the likelihood that existing homeowners “trade‐up” to larger homes in better locations.     

The Friedman rule: Old and new

In overlapping generations models, money growth creates intergenerational wealth effects and leads to the breakdown of the Friedman rule; the rule can be restored via lump-sum tax and transfers that neutralize these wealth transfers. Additionally, and in contrast to money-in-the-utility-function models, the Friedman rule is not the unique first-best solution in cash-in-advance-constraint models of money: a continuum of combinations of money growth rates and consumption taxes implement the first-best allocation. This paper traces through the intellectual origins of the first (old) result, which was recently restated in Bhattacharya, et al. [2005. Monetary policy, fiscal policy, and the inflation tax: equivalence results. Macroeconomic Dynamics 7, 647-669.] and formally demonstrates the second (new) result.     

Removing Homeownership Bias in Taxation: The Distributional Effects of Including Net Imputed Rent in Taxable Income

The income tax systems of most countries entail a favourable treatment of homeownership, compared to rental‐occupied housing. Such ‘homeownership bias’ and its consequences for a wide range of economic outcomes have long been recognised in the economic literature. Although a removal of the homeownership bias is generally advocated on efficiency grounds, its distributional implications are often neglected, especially in a cross‐country perspective. In this paper, we aim to fill this gap by investigating the first‐order effects, in terms of distribution of income and work incentives, of removing the income tax provisions favouring homeownership. We consider six European countries – Belgium, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands and the UK – that exhibit important variation in terms of income tax treatment of homeowners. Using the multi‐country tax benefit model EUROMOD, we analyse the distributional consequences of including net imputed rent in the taxable income definition that applies in each country, together with the removal of existing special tax treatments of incomes or expenses related to the main residence; thus, we provide a measure of the homeownership bias. We implement three tax policy scenarios. In the first, imputed rent is included in the taxable income of homeowners, while at the same time existing mortgage interest tax relief schemes and taxation of cadastral incomes are abolished. In the two further revenue‐neutral scenarios, the additional tax revenue raised through the taxation of imputed rent is redistributed to taxpayers, through either a tax rate reduction or a tax exemption increase. The results show how including net imputed rent in the tax base might affect inequality in each of the countries considered. Housing taxation appears to be a promising avenue for raising additional revenues, or lightening taxation of labour, with no inequality‐increasing side effects.     

A model for tax advantages of portfolios with many assets

Taxable portfolios present challenges for optimization models with even a limited number of assets. Holding many assets, however, has a distinct tax advantage over holding few assets. In this paper, we develop a model that takes an extreme view of a portfolio as a continuum of assets to gain the broadest possible advantage from holding many assets. We find the optimal strategy for trading in this portfolio in the absence of transaction costs and develop bounding approximations on the optimal value. We compare the results in a simulation study to a portfolio consisting only of a market index and show that the multi-asset portfolio’s tax advantage can lead either to significant consumption or bequest increases.     

The Effect of Volume of Intrafirm Transfers on Market Metrics

In this paper, we examine the relationship between international intrafirm area transfers and market metrics as measured by market-to-book value and systematic risk. Intrafirm transfers – the amount that multinational corporations charge one another for the transfer of goods, intellectual property, and services – have become an increasingly important issue for policymaking, managerial, financial, and tax purposes. This paper also examines whether international intrafirm intergeographic area transfers are attributed to corporate tax. We find that firms with a sizable volume of international intrafirm transfers have higher systematic risk than comparable firms without these transfers. We show cross-sectionally that firms engage in international transfers have a higher market-to-book ratio, suggesting that transfers add value through their effect on earnings and taxes. Consistent with Mills and Newberry (2003) and Collins, Kemsley, and Lang (1998), we document that U.S. (global) income tax is positively (negatively) related to intrafirm transfers, implying that U.S. multinational firms shifted taxable income to the United States from 1995 to 1999.     

Targeting welfare in Italy: old problems and perspectives on reform

This paper has two principal objectives. Using a tax‐benefit microsimulation model and the 1998 micro data of the Bank of Italy survey of household income and wealth, we first study the distributional effects of the current Italian income maintenance system and highlight its main defects and limitations, concerning in particular its unequal coverage of the population and its low efficiency in fighting poverty. The second aim is to describe and analyse the reforms recently implemented in this field; in particular, the Italian government has reformed the targeting criteria and introduced three new cash transfers. We describe these reforms both in their institutional characteristics and in their likely distributional consequences, and examine whether and to what extent they are able to overcome the shortcomings of the current system.     

The impact of consumer behavior on financial security of households in Poland

The paper applies the concept of identity to investigate whether consumer behavior matters for a household's financial security. It is assumed that considerable part of households may express their identity through status-oriented consumption. The research is carried out in two steps. First, the index of financial security is built and used to determine the level of financial security experienced by working-age families in Poland. Second, the simulation results based on an econometric model are employed to find the answer to the question: Does financial insecurity result more from the need to manifest consumption at the higher level than average in an income-group of which people are members, or people want to be distinguishable inside their own income-group but they do not identify with a group having consumption at visibly higher level, or from the need to improve self-image by bringing own consumption closer to the pattern of a group with higher wealth status of which they are not members? The source of data is the 2005-2009 Households Budget Surveys in Poland. The findings offer empirical evidence for the relevance of consumer behavior for financial security of households in Poland. Considerable part of households expresses identity through conspicuous consumption. Both groups of households, the insecurity rich and the insecurity poor, accept the same ranking of status goods: a car on the first position, next homes (housing and equipment) and clothes on the third place. Status-oriented consumption creates life beyond means and pushes even relatively rich households towards financial insecurity.     

The Heterogeneous Responses of Consumption between Poor and Rich to Government Spending Shocks

Government spending shocks have substantially different effects on consumers across the income distribution: consumption increases for the poor whereas it decreases for the rich in response to a rise in government expenditure. I shed light on this issue by incorporating a progressive tax scheme and productive public expenditure into a heterogeneous agent model economy with indivisible labor. The model economy is able to successfully match aggregate and disaggregate effects of government spending shocks on consumption. When the government increases its spending and accompanies it by a rise in tax progressivity, the poor are employed and increase their consumption since after‐tax wage rates increase while the rich decrease their consumption because of a fall in after‐tax wage rates.     

How Do People Cope with Natural Disasters? Evidence from the Great Hanshin-Awaji (Kobe) Earthquake in 1995

This paper investigates the coping strategies employed by victims of the Great Hanshin-Awaji (Kobe) earthquake in 1995. Using a unique household data set, we show that households that held a large amount of collateralizable assets before the catastrophe and were free from a binding borrowing constraint were able to maintain their consumption levels by borrowing. In contrast, households subject to a binding borrowing constraint before the disaster were unable to borrow to cope with the losses inflicted by the earthquake. On the other hand, both types of households relied on private transfers, depending on the extent of the damage.     

The spirit of capitalism among the income classes

This paper tests the consumption-based capital asset model within the context of the spirit of capitalism. The spirit of capitalism asserts that consumers gain utility not just from consumption of goods and services, but also from the social status obtained from wealth. We examine two asset pricing models developed by Bakshi and Chen (1996) that employ wealth in the utility function, for households sorted by income quintiles. In the first model, households obtain utility from both consumption and the social status that comes from their own wealth. In the second model, households gain utility from both consumption and the social status obtained from their own wealth relative to the wealth of other peer households. Our results indicate that both models are inconsistent with the data regardless of income. However, using cointegration methods as a diagnostic tool, we find that the data are “loosely” consistent with the spirit of capitalism, at least for the upper income quintiles.     

Altruism, incomplete markets, and tax reform

We compute the welfare effects of different revenue-neutral tax reforms that eliminate capital income taxation in two general equilibrium models calibrated to the U.S. economy. In our dynastic model, the reform with the largest welfare gain is the one that eliminates all income taxation and increases the consumption tax to 35%; 75% of the population alive at the time of the reform benefit from it. Individuals use intervivos transfers and bequests to redistribute the long-run benefits. In a pure life-cycle economy that lacks this redistribution technology, we find that the same reform would benefit only 9% of the population.     

Housing returns,precautionary savings and consumption: Micro evidence from China

We investigate how changes in home prices affect consumption in China via a wealth channel. Examining a panel of 7955 households via fixed effects and instrumental variable methods, we find a marginal propensity to consume out of housing wealth (home-price MPC) that is concentrated on goods consumed for pleasure rather than necessity. This trend is driven by the value of second homes rather than that of primary residences, suggesting a wealth channel. We further examine whether returns on housing investment, including rental income and home appreciation, fund the wealth channel; however, we find little supporting evidence. In contrast, a reduction in health risk increases the home-price MPC, but a reduction in income risk that also relieves precautionary saving motives does not. Our results are robust to alternative data, common-factor progress, expenditure shocks and bequest motives. We contribute by examining second homes, which carry little of the dual nature of housing that primary residences do, to identify a controversial wealth channel, and by studying the relative effects of health and income risks on the wealth channel.     

The future of social security

We analyze the effect of the projected demographic transition on the political support for social security, and equilibrium outcomes. Embedding a probabilistic-voting setup of electoral competition in the standard OLG model with capital accumulation, we find that intergenerational transfers arise in the absence of altruism, commitment, or trigger strategies. Closed-form solutions predict population ageing to lead to higher social security tax rates, a rising share of pensions in GDP, but eventually lower social security benefits per retiree. The response of equilibrium tax rates to demographic shocks reduces old-age consumption risk. Calibrated to match features of the U.S. economy, the model suggests that, in response to the projected demographic transition, social security tax rates will gradually increase to 16%. Other policies that distort labor supply will become less important; labor supply therefore will rise, in contrast with frequently voiced fears.     

Intergovernmental Fiscal Transfers and Local Incentives and Responses: The Case of Indonesia

Indonesian policymakers are convinced that a number of perverse incentives are embedded in their system of intergovernmental transfers. Officials in countries throughout the developing world have similar views about their own intergovernmental frameworks. In Indonesia, perverse incentives are thought to negatively influence a wide range of local government fiscal behaviours, including as regards own‐source revenues, spending and savings. An empirical analysis of the local government response to transfers, however, offers only mixed support for the existence and strength of the presumed incentives. Overall, the findings in this paper highlight the benefits to central governments of rigorously examining assumed perverse incentives in their intergovernmental frameworks before embarking on attempts to expunge them.     

Housing Finance Arrangements,Wealth Positioning and Housing Consumption in Japan: An Analysis of Built-for-sale Homeowners

Home purchase is financed through equity and debt. Housing finance arrangements require initial downpayments and impose monthly repayments. Similar to many countries, Japanese households accumulate savings out of their current income and receive private transfers from parents or relatives. From the survey conducted by the Ministry of Land, Transportation and Infrastructure from 1992 to 2000, the paper analyses the time spell until built-for sale homebuyers have amassed sufficient equity to meet the downpayment requirement. For the first-time buyers, private aid in form of cash was the dominant component of equity besides own savings. The innovative feature of our paper is to categorize the households into four classes of positive versus negative excess savings and positive versus negative excess “luck” as other equity sources including private transfers get termed here. For each category we estimate the duration of the accumulation process, and perform a sensitivity analysis that compares the spells under varying amounts of GHLC-loans with other types of mortgages. Since GHLC-loans are means-tested, they can effectively counteract the regressive effects arising from income; but as we will show they cannot really speed up the access in favour of the poorer strata. This finding sheds light on a growing wealth disparity that causes self-selection in ownership access.     

Housing and the Tax System: How Large Are the Distortions in the Euro Area?*

This paper presents new evidence on the impact of the preferential treatment of owner‐occupied housing in the euro area. We find that tax benefits to homeowners reduce the user cost of housing capital by almost 40 per cent compared with the efficient level under neutral taxation. On average, the tax subsidy translates into an excess consumption of housing services equivalent to 7.8 per cent of the value of owner‐occupied housing, or about 30 per cent of financial asset holdings in household portfolios. The bulk of the subsidy stems from undertaxation of the return to home equity, while the average contribution of the tax rebate for mortgage interest payments is driven down by relatively low loan‐to‐value ratios in the data. However, at the margin, the tax‐induced incentive to use mortgage debt to finance the purchase of the main residence is sizeable.