Optimal size of the government: the role of the elasticity of substitution

This paper analyzes the optimal fiscal policy in an endogenous growth model with productive public services. Government expenditure, which may be subject to different degrees of congestion, is financed by distortionary income taxation. The standard result on the equality between the growth-maximizing, welfare-maximizing and first-best income tax rates holds if and only if production is Cobb–Douglas or there is proportional congestion. With non-proportional (or in the absence of) congestion, the first-best income tax is lower than the (second-best) welfare-maximizing income tax which, in turn, is lower than the growth-maximizing income tax if the elasticity of substitution is below unity. Under mild conditions these relations are reversed if the elasticity of substitution is above unity. Intuition on these results is also provided.     

Personal income tax progressivity and output volatility: Evidence from OECD countries

This paper investigates empirically the effect of personal income tax progressivity on output volatility using macro data from a sample of OECD countries over the period 1982–2009. Our measure of progressivity is based on the difference between the marginal and the average personal income tax rate for the average production worker. We find supportive empirical evidence for the hypothesis that higher personal income tax progressivity leads to lower output volatility. This effect comes in addition to the stabilizing impact of government size and it is equally important in economic terms. All other factors constant, countries with more progressive personal income tax systems seem to benefit from stronger automatic stabilizers.     

TOP INCOMES IN NEW ZEALAND 1921–2005: UNDERSTANDING THE EFFECTS OF MARGINAL TAX RATES, MIGRATION THREAT, AND THE MACROECONOMY

Using taxation statistics, we estimate the income share held by top income groups in New Zealand over the period 1921–2005. We find that the income share of the richest fell during the 1930s, rose again after the Second World War, and steadily declined from the late-1950s until the mid-1980s. From the mid-1980s until the mid-1990s, top income shares rose rapidly, particularly at the very top of the distribution. We present evidence that top marginal tax rates and changing top income shares in Australia and the United Kingdom may have contributed to fluctuations in the income share of the richest 1 percent. Past economic growth does not seem to have a strong effect on the income share of the top percentile group.     

TAXATION AND ECONOMIC GROWTH IN NEW ZEALAND

Since the Second World War and until recent reforms, New Zealand has suffered from a low rate of economic growth and a high level of taxation. This paper models the relationship between taxation and economic growth and estimates the "optimal"or "growth-maximizing" tax rate. It is found to be about half of the actual tax rate. The marginal cost of taxation in New Zealand is S2.64 for each extra dollar of taxes collected.     

The growth-maximizing level of regulation: Evidence from a panel of international data

Existing evidence suggests that regulation diminishes economic growth. In theory, however, regulation may be either growth-enhancing or diminishing. We therefore empirically revisit the relation between regulation and growth, allowing for both positive and negative effects. In an unbalanced panel of 132 countries over eight time periods, we find evidence of a hump-shape relation between regulation and growth. The estimates imply that for more than 95% of the sample the total effect of regulation on growth is positive. The estimates also imply that about 60% of the sample observations are associated with over-regulation, relative to the growth-maximizing level. Similar findings apply to the (majority) subsample of non-OECD nations in the dataset. However, for the (minority) subsample of OECD nations, both the total and marginal effects of regulation on growth are negative.     

Optimal top marginal tax rates under income splitting for couples

This paper provides formulas for optimal top marginal tax rates when couples are taxed according to income splitting between spouses, consumption is taxed, and the skill distribution is unbounded. Optimal top marginal income tax rates are computed for Germany using a dataset that includes the tax returns of all German top taxpayers. We find that the optimal top marginal tax rate converges to about 2/3 and convergence obtains at income levels that are substantially higher than those currently subject to the actual top tax rate.     

INCOME INSTABILITY AND THE RESPONSE OF THE SAFETY NET

This paper examines the response of safety net transfer and tax programs to earnings and income shocks across recessions since the early 1980s. Safety net programs in the United States are designed to dampen economic instability and maintain basic needs for families. Such programs, including TANF, SNAP (food stamps), and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), have been tested during and between recessions of the past 30 years, including the recent 2007–2009 Great Recession. I use matched data in the March Current Population Survey (CPS) from 1980 to 2012 to estimate pre‐ and post‐transfer income instability over the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, as well as across recessions. The results are disaggregated by family structure, race, income, and education. Transfer programs are associated with lowered instability levels and flatter trend growth from 1980 to 2012 among socioeconomically disadvantaged subgroups, while the tax system reduces income instability for families in the top 40th percentile of the income distribution. Although the largest instability reductions occur among the poor, since 1980 the safety net appears less responsive to instability for the bottom income quintile, female‐headed families, and black families. (JEL I38, J63)     

Are corporate tax rates, or countries, converging?

The statutory rate and effective tax rate imposed on corporation income—as well as the dispersion of these rates—began to decline in the 1980s. Is this due to changes in the domestic determinants of corporate taxation or increases in international pressures for tax competition?This paper finds clear evidence that the corporate tax rate is insulated from a country's revenue needs: across countries, there is no association of the expenditure-GDP ratio with the corporate statutory rate and only weak evidence of a positive association with the average rate. There is suggestive, but not definitive, evidence that the domestic role of the corporate tax as a backstop to the individual income tax is important: across countries, there is indeed a strong association between the top individual rate and the top statutory corporate rate.There is intriguing evidence about the role of international competitive pressures on corporate taxation. Measures of openness are negatively associated with statutory corporate rates, although not with revenues collected as a fraction of GDP. Strikingly, larger, more trade-intensive countries do collect more corporate tax, but this may be because these countries are more attractive venues for investment.     

ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND GROWTH IN U.S. STATE‐LEVEL MARKET INCOMES AT THE TOP AND BOTTOM

This paper investigates the relationship between economic freedom and income growth and inequality across U.S. states over the period 1979–2011. The focus is on market income at the top and bottom of the income distribution. Results show that increases in overall freedom are associated with average income growth. When viewed separately, an increase in overall freedom is associated with larger income growth rates for income earners in the bottom 90% relative to the top 10%. Interestingly, results show that increases in overall economic freedom are related to larger relative growth rates for the top 10% incomes within high‐income states and larger relative growth rates for the bottom 90% incomes within low‐income states. Top‐to‐bottom income ratio regressions suggest a negative and statistically significant relationship between economic freedom and income inequality. (JEL D63, P16, R11)     

Social norms and economic growth in a model with labor and capital income tax evasion

Empirical evidence suggests that low-income countries are characterized by high levels of labor and capital income tax evasion while the opposite is true for high-income countries. This paper proposes a model to study the relationship between economic growth and both types of income tax evasion. We show that the existence of a social norm towards tax compliance generates a complementarity between capital and labor income tax evasion which explains the decline of both the share of evaders in the population and the amount of tax evasion when countries accumulate capital. The model predicts that the level of tax morale is positively correlated with both types of income tax evasion and the level of income per capita, consistent with recent empirical evidence. Finally, a higher tax rate increases the share of evaders in the population and aggregate tax evasion.     

Debt,seigniorage, and the Growth Laffer Curve in developing countries

The endogenous growth literature established the existence of an inverted-U curve between taxes and economic growth, namely a Growth Laffer Curve, but empirical evidence on this relationship in developing countries is rather limited. Given that seigniorage and public debt are also important means of financing public spending in these countries, we take into account in this paper their respective impacts on growth, as they might deform the existing relationship between taxes and growth. To this end, we develop a growth model with public investment as the engine of perpetual growth, and look for the effect of debt, tax and money financing on economic growth. We study in particular the way fiscal and monetary policies deform the Growth Laffer Curve in developing countries. An empirical section based on a panel of 100 developing countries over the period 1980–2010 provides both OLS-Fixed Effects and GMM-system estimations that support our theoretical conclusions, namely the existence of Growth Laffer Curves indexed by the levels of debt and of seigniorage.     

Growth volatility and the interaction between economic and political development

Research on the effect of democracy on economic growth has not reached a definitive conclusion. Yet, research on the effect of democracy on economic growth volatility has consistently found that higher levels of democracy reduce volatility. Similarly, research has found that higher levels of economic development retard volatility. Using a novel empirical approach, this article presents evidence of an interactive effect between higher levels of democratization and economic development on growth volatility. Specifically, the marginal effect of political development on volatility is negative until countries reach per capita income levels of about $2,700, depending on the conditioning set. The marginal effect is insignificant for countries with higher levels of income. This implies that at a minimum, nearly 50% of the countries in our sample could enjoy less volatile economies with greater political development.     

Genetic distance,economic growth and top income shares: Evidence from OECD countries

The relationship between economic growth and income inequality remains a puzzle in the literature. The main problem has been finding a way to account for the endogeneity of growth. Using century-long data of 14 OECD countries, this study disentangles the growth–inequality relationship. In doing so, our main contribution is employing genetic and geographical distances as instruments for economic growth. The instruments are constructed on the premise that the growth of one country spills over to the others if they are connected through trade and other forms of exchange; however, the genetic and geographical distances between countries represent barriers to such spillovers. Using alternative specifications and measures, we find that growth reduces the inequality measured by top income shares. As capital share increases in the growth process and capital substitutes labour, inequality-reducing strength of growth declines. Another important finding is that the effect of growth on top income shares is more significant among the highest income groups.     

A structural VAR approach on labour taxation policies

This paper presents a Structural VAR analysis on the employment and output effects of labour tax policies in six European countries for the period 1974–1997. By considering impulse response functions, it turns out that, on average, a shock to the total personal income tax revenues is positively correlated to employment, whereas there is mixed evidence on the output effect. Moreover, the quantitative impact of these effects, especially those related to the output, appears to be quite small. However, by introducing explicitly four labour tax parameters (namely the marginal and average tax rates for the personal income tax and the payroll tax), it turns out that these effects are not negligible after all: for some countries it is possible to conceive labour taxes as policy instruments favouring more employment and a better economic performance. However, the empirical support on the sign of the output and employment effects is mixed, suggesting that the same domestic fiscal policy does not produce the same impact in all the European countries.     

Worldwide Tax Reform ‘How Does Australia Compare?’

Drawing principally on the English-speaking countries, where tax reform has proceeded furthest, the common characteristics and causes of the worldwide tax reform movement of the 1980s are examined. Tax reform reflected the change in economic philosophy — disillusionment with state intervention and a revival of belief in the efficacy of markets.
The causes and content of tax reform in Australia have much in common with those elsewhere except that the reduction in marginal rates of income tax was achieved with no real change in the tax mix. The success of tax reform is assessed using as criteria: (i) how far the outcome matched the objectives specified by the reformers themselves — in particular tax neutrality; (ii) the sustain-ability of the reforms; and (iii) how far 'undesirable' consequences (especially distributional effects) were avoided. Applying these criteria to Ireland, Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, New Zealand and Australia, it is concluded that in all these countries there are deficiencies, but Australia comes second to New Zealand in the success league. The notable Australian deficiencies are the lack of a broad-based consumption tax (Australia is now the only OECD country without one) and the fact that lower marginal rates of income tax have been achieved mainly because of falling real thresholds of the tax brackets.     

Corporate Taxation and Productivity Catch‐Up: Evidence from European Firms

In this paper, we explore whether higher corporate tax rates, because they lower the after‐tax returns to productivity‐enhancing investments, reduce the speed with which small firms converge to the productivity frontier. Using data for 11 European countries, we find evidence that their productivity catch‐up is slower when the statutory corporate tax rates are higher. In contrast, we find that large firms are instead affected by effective marginal rates. Using the reduced‐form model of productivity convergence of Griffith et al . (2009, Journal of Regional Science 49 , 689–720), our results are robust to a host of robustness checks and a natural experiment that exploits the 2001 German tax reforms.     

Financial development,institutional quality and maximizing-growth trade-off in government finance

This paper studies monetary and fiscal policies in an endogenous growth model with transaction costs. We show that the relation between long-run economic growth and both monetary and fiscal policies is subject to threshold effects, a result that gives account of a number of recent empirical findings. Furthermore, the model shows that, to finance public expenditures, growth-maximizing governments must choose relatively high seigniorage (respectively income taxation), if “institutional quality” and “financial development” indicators are low (respectively high). Thus, our model may explain why some governments resort to seigniorage and inflationary finance, and others rather resort to high tax rates, as a result of growth-maximizing strategies in different structural environments (notably concerning institutional and financial development contexts). In addition, the model allows examining how the optimal mix of government finance changes in response to different public debt contexts. A short empirical section confirms our theoretical results.     

The growth effects of tax rates in the OECD

This paper explores the merits of macro‐ and micro‐based tax rate measures within an open economy “fiscal policy and growth” model. Using annual data for 15 OECD countries we find statistically small, non‐robust long‐run growth effects of macro‐based average tax rates on capital income and consumption, but some evidence for average labour income tax effects. Changes in “micro” marginal income tax rates at both the personal and corporate levels yield statistically robust GDP responses of modest size. Both domestic and foreign corporate taxes appear relevant. In general, tax effects on GDP operate largely via factor productivity rather than factor accumulation.     

New estimates of labour supply elasticities for married women in Canada 1996–2005

In this article, we estimate income and substitution labour supply and participation elasticities for Canadian married women using data from the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics 1996–2005. We use the Canadian Tax and Credit Simulator (CTaCS) and detailed information on the structure of income at the household level to compute the marginal tax rates faced by each individual. We then use these marginal tax rates to compute net own-wage, spouse-wage, and nonlabour income. We show how the magnitude of the estimated elasticities varies depending on whether net or gross wages and income are used in the estimation procedure, and quantify biases caused by using average tax rates instead of marginal tax rates. Finally, because marginal tax rates vary significantly over the sample, we use quantile regressions to compare elasticities at different points of the hours distribution. Overall, our results show that public policies now have, on average, less scope for influencing hours of work than 10 years ago. However, the quantile results show that wives working fewer hours per week are more sensitive to changes in their own or spouses’ wages.     

An empirical characterization of the effects of public debt on economic growth

Based on a data set of 115 economies, this article empirically investigates the relation between public debt and economic growth. Using the World Bank’s classification for income groups, we initially find that those countries that present the lowest public debt are characterized by the highest economic growth, while the smallest growth rates are associated with the highest public debt. Nevertheless, this conclusion is tempered when we analyse the countries by income level: low-income countries have a different behaviour with respect to lower-middle, upper-middle and high-income countries. When using the IMF’s country classification, the results do not suggest a clear pattern in the public debt–economic growth nexus across different countries, but indicate a heterogeneous relationship between such key macroeconomic variables.