The vanishing savings motive

The overlapping generations model with life-time uncertainty is capable of generating unfamiliar, nonmonotonic adjustment phenomena that are attributed to a transitory savings motive. Slowly falling (increasing) wages create transitory savings (dis-)incentives which vanish in the long run when wage profiles become stationary again. Such a transitory savings component comes on top of a base component created by the permanently operating long-run savings incentives, and it easily gives rise to overshooting adjustment. Assets and consumption may even move first in a direction opposite to the implied long-run changes.     

Pension reform,retirement, and life-cycle unemployment

This paper investigates the labor market impact of four often proposed policy measures for sustainable pensions: strengthening the tax benefit link, moving from wage to price indexation of benefits, lengthening calculation periods, and introducing more actuarial fairness in pension assessment. We consider the impact on three margins of aggregate labor supply, retirement behavior, job search, and hours worked. We provide some analytical results and use a computational model to demonstrate the economic impact of recent pension reform in Austria. Reducing the distortion in the retirement decision by introducing pension supplements and discounts conditional on the chosen retirement date promises the largest gains. We also find that the pension reform is far from sufficient to offset the fiscal implications of projected demographic change in Austria.     

Exports,foreign direct investment,and the costs of corporate taxation

This paper develops a model of a monopolistically competitive industry with extensive and intensive investment and shows how these margins respond to changes in average and marginal corporate tax rates. Intensive investment refers to the size of a firm’s capital stock. Extensive investment refers to the firm’s production location and reflects the trade-off between exports and foreign direct investment as alternative modes of foreign market access. The paper derives comparative static effects of the corporate tax and shows how the cost of public funds depends on the measures of effective marginal and average tax rates and on the elasticities of extensive and intensive investment. The paper was presented in 2006 at the German public finance meeting in Giessen; the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna; the ESF/CEPR Workshop on Outsourcing, Migration and the European Economy in Rome; the University of St. Gallen; the Graduate Institute for International Studies in Geneva, and in 2007 at the International Monetary Fund in Washington, DC, the CESifo Area Conference in Public Sector Economics in Munich and the 63rd IIPF Congress in Warwick. I appreciate stimulating comments by Michael Devereux and seminar participants and, in particular, by the discussants Andreas Haufler and Nadine Riedl, an anonymous referee and the editor Richard Cornes.     

Profit taxes and financing constraints

Without financing frictions, profit taxes reduce investment by their effect on the user cost of capital. With financing constraints, investment becomes sensitive to cash-flow. In this situation, even small taxes impose first order welfare losses, and ACE and cash-flow tax systems are no longer neutral. When banks become active and provide monitoring services in addition to finance, an ACE tax yields larger investment and welfare than an equal yield cash-flow tax.     

Investment Externalities and a Corrective Subsidy

The paper proposes an intertemporal equilibrium model that highlights the interdependence between aggregate investment and the degree of product differentiation with free entry of monopolistic producers. An investment externality is identified that results in underaccumulation of capital in the decentralized market equilibrium. Some form of investment promotion is called for. The paper compares the effectiveness of a general investment tax credit and an ad valorem output subsidy with policies that favor smaller business size. It is also shown that the complementarity among individual investments creates a potentially powerful investment multiplier.     

Public Policy for Venture Capital

This paper proposes a simple partial equilibrium model to investigate the effects of government policy on venture capital backed investments. Giving up an alternative career, entrepreneurs focus their effort on a single, high risk venture each. Venture capitalists acquire an equity stake and offer a base salary as well. In addition to providing incentive compatible equity finance, they support the venture with managerial advice to raise survival chances. We analyze several policy measures addressed at venture capital activity: government spending on entrepreneurial training, subsidies to equipment investment, and output subsidies at the production stage. While these measures stimulate entrepreneurship, only cost-effective government services can improve welfare.     

A growth oriented dual income tax

This paper proposes a growth oriented dual income tax by combining an allowance for corporate equity with a broadly defined flat tax on personal capital income. Revenue losses are compensated by an increase in the value added tax. The paper demonstrates the neutrality properties of the reform with respect to investment, firm financial decisions and organizational choice. Tax rates are chosen to prevent income shifting from labor to capital income. The reform decisively strengthens investment of domestically owned firms as well as home and foreign based multinationals and boosts savings. Simulations with a calibrated growth model for Switzerland indicate that the reform could add between 4 to 5 percent of GNP in the long-run, depending on the specific scenario. Given the slow nature of capital accumulation, it imposes considerable costs in the short-run. We consider a tax smoothing scenario to offset the intergenerationally redistributive effects. JEL Classification: D58, D92, E62, G32, H25     

An Incumbent Country View on Eastern Enlargement of the EU Part I: A General Treatment

An eastern enlargement of the EU, from an incumbent country point of view,involves a fiscal burden from extending Union agricultural and cohesion policiesto new members, coupled with potential gains as well as adjustment problemsderiving from an extended customs union and a larger single market. Enlargementis controversial, because the net effect is unclear, a priori, and will certainly vary across individual countries. Our two-part contribution tries to do shed light on this controversy. In this first part, we present a general treatment of the likely effects on different incumbent countries, while a subsequent companion paper will take a closer look at the specific case of Austria. The general view of part I, in turn, first focuses on various empirical measures highlighting crucial differences between incumbents, pertaining to the fiscal burden on the one hand, and integration gains on the other. We then argue that a proper evaluation must rely on an explicit welfare criterion, and we use a general model of economic integration in order to identify the principalchannels through which aggregate welfare of an incumbent country is affected by an enlargement of the EU. We address traditional effects of trade creation and trade diversion, as well as growth effects arising from an abolition of trade barriers. In addition, we ask how enlargement affects foreign direct investmentand labor migration, and what this implies in welfare terms for an incumbent western European country. Taken together, these effects generate a certain presumption of integration gains, which need to be set against the fiscal burden. However, a final judgement requires a case-by-case approach, based on empirical implementations of enriched and parameterized models for specific countries. The companion paper, therefore, uses a suitably specified, calibrated dynamic equilibrium model, in order to take a closer look at the Austrian case.     

Public Debt and Generational Balance in Austria

Based on Austria's fiscal stance in 1995, wecompute the generational accounts for currently living as well as future generations.The results reveal the existence of an intergenerational imbalance in favor of currentlyliving generations. Total public sector liabilities may be more than five times as high asthe officially recorded level of public debt. Without any action, future generations would facelife-time net taxes that are about 65 percent higher than the tax burden of a current newborn.If the government could fully and permanently retain the expenditure cutting andrevenue raising effects of the 1996 fiscal consolidation package and the 1997 pension reform,then it might be able to significantly reduce the intergenerational liabilities. However,enacting both the recent tax reform 2000 and the reform of the family support scheme wouldincrease again the fiscal imbalance and intergenerational bias of fiscal policy in Austria.