Public policies as specification errors

Treating public policies as computable dynamic general equilibrium model specification errors offers computational and conceptional advantages for comparing models with data. The set of policies calculated to rationalize observed behaviors raises the substantive economic question whether, in any particular market, actual public policies sufficiently coincide with the model's behavior-rationalizing policies, or whether the model offers correct hypotheses about the determinants of demand and supply. As illustrations, public policies are calculated to rationalize, with respect to the stochastic neoclassical growth model, capital market behavior since WWII and labor market behavior in 1929–1950. One conclusion is that capital taxation drives a wedge between consumption growth and the expected pre-tax capital return, in the direction and amount predicted by the theory, and that capital taxation is the major intertemporal distortion in the postwar capital market. Second, a good theory of the Great Depression labor market must explain why measured MRS and MPL diverged so dramatically in 1929–1933 and why the wedge persisted.     

Intercorporate Ownership,Taxes, and Corporate Payout Choices*

This paper examines whether corporate payout choices (dividends or share repurchases) are associated with intercorporate ownership in a firm. Using the System for Electronic Document Analysis and Retrieval (SEDAR) and the Inter‐Corporate Ownership (ICO) database from Statistics Canada, I find that intercorporate ownership is positively associated with a firm’s propensity to pay dividends and negatively associated with a firm’s propensity to repurchase shares. The findings are robust to the endogeneity of intercorporate ownership and the inclusion of various control variables such as firm size, risk, liquidity, growth, and profitability.     

Understanding heterogeneity in price changes and firm responses to a national unhealthy food tax in Mexico

To address the high prevalence of overweight and obesity in Mexico, an eight percent ad valorem excise tax on non-essential energy-dense foods came into effect on 1 January 2014. This paper estimates price changes after the tax implementation among the top four food categories and by leading vs. non-leading firms using purchase information from over 6000 urban households in the 2012–2015 Nielsen Mexico Consumer Panel. We create product-city-month specific prices that correct for potential biases associated with household and retailer characteristics. Using these corrected prices, we conduct before and after quasi-experimental analyses and find that price increases were larger than eight percent for cookies but were less than eight percent for ready-to-eat cereals, salty snacks, and pre-packaged sweet bread. For the latter food group, event-study analyses on the gradual price change over time suggest that price changes might be the result of an increasing price trend rather than the tax implementation. Firm-level analyses mostly show that price increases by the leading firms were larger than the overall increase at the food market level, helping explain variability in post-tax declines in food purchases as reported in other research. We also find that price changes are generally underestimated when we do not correct prices for biases associated with households and retailers. These results improve our understanding of the mechanisms behind heterogeneous changes in purchases after the tax implementation. Additionally, these results can assist policymakers when designing or improving taxes on non-essential energy-dense foods at a time when these policy options are high on the agenda in many places.     

The contractionary effects of tax shocks on productivity: An empirical and theoretical analysis

I analyze the effects of tax policy changes on US Total Factor Productivity. VAR estimates show that permanent and exogenous tax increases have strong, permanent, and negative effects on TFP which represent about 80% of change in output following the tax increase. I then build a DSGE model which has learning-by-doing and endogenous TFP evolution. The benchmark model is able to replicate the empirical impulse responses. However, when I calibrate the model as in the literature, the effect of taxes on TFP is substantially less elastic than in the data. I argue that this divergence may arise because tax changes labeled as exogenous can give spurious results or because of a mis-specified model.     

Cyclicality of taxes and external debt

In their work, Vegh and Vuletin have shown that statutory tax rates are acyclical in developed economies and procyclical in developing ones. This article extends their analysis by checking the interaction of statutory tax rates with countries’ external public debt. In general, we found that the value added tax rates are changed procyclically in both developed and developing countries (i.e. taxes are raised in bad times and reduced in good times). However, when the external debt is high, in the developing countries the procyclicality increases, while the opposite result holds for developed economies. This pattern occurs mainly in times of recession, when the need for loans is the highest. Although we found that there was a reduction in procyclicality after the 2000s, these findings pose a challenge to policy-makers, who should think of ways of dealing with lack of foreign funds in difficult times.     

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.     

Is Chinas Fiscal policy Sustainable： An Empirical Research

本文简要回顾了财政可持续性（Fiscal Sustainability）相关研究文献，选择国际标准的计量经济学分析工具，选取适当模型对中国财政可持续性进行检验，并就不同情形下的财政可持续性所对应的赤字率进行模拟分析，具体分析了不同情境下通胀、经济增长、利息支付、铸币税等因素对可持续性财政赤字率的影响。综合分析后可以判断中国目前的财政状况基本属于可持续性状态，中国财政整体上仍处于健康状态，积极财政政策仍有作为的空间，但是对于地方政府债务等需要引起高度重视。最后，本文就财政政策调整提出合理的建议。     

Balancing budget through tax increases or expenditure cuts: is it neutral?

Fiscal adjustment currently ranks at the top in the economic policy agenda of many OECD countries, and not only those European countries aiming to meet the Maastricht convergence criteria. Recently, Alesina and Perotti argued that successful cases of fiscal adjustment resulted from cutting expenditures, while those focusing on tax increases were unsuccessful. The paper, using a bivariate VECM representation for the joint government revenue–government expenditure dynamics for five of the main OECD countries, provides two contributions to this issue. First, it proposes and performs a neutrality test of the alternative adjustment strategies (through revenue or expenditures), second it characterizes the departure from neutrality in the three countries where the neutrality hypothesis is rejected. The conclusion, prevailing for these three countries, is that adjustment through taxes not only is inefficient, but even results in a perverse effect with induced extra expenditures which more than offset the increase in government revenue.     

固定资产减值的会计税务差异及其纳税调整

《固定资产准则》与《企业所得税税前扣除办法》对固定资产减值的处理存在较大差异。本文就两者差异和如何进行纳税调整作了初步探讨。     

Critical Cause of Regional Disparity in Per Capita Fiscal Revenues --Based on Analysis and Explanation of 2003-2010 Provincial Data of China

本文采用多种分析方法研究我国区域财政收入差异的核心成因。首先利用基尼系数分解法,考察了2003—2010年各类财政收入来源对人均财政收入差异的贡献,发现在此期间区域间人均GDP差异呈现出先增加后缩小的趋势,人均财政收入差异虽呈现出收敛态势,但仍然非常显著,远大于人均GDP差异,导致该现象的关键因素是营业税。由于营业税主要源于第三产业,本文继而采用主成分分析法和面板数据模型进一步讨论了产业发展对区域间人均财政收入差异的影响,得出第三产业的发展是区域财政收入差异形成的核心原因的结论。该结论对缩小区域财政差异的政策选择有启发作用。