拉弗曲线的深度分析--兼析中国个人所得税制的政策涵义

目前,中国贫富差距越来越大,已对社会经济发展构成不利.个人所得税应成为再分配的调节工具之一,适当的个人所得税边际税率机制并不会像想象的那样伤害效率.但强调效率的人会以拉弗曲线为依据,主张降低个人所得税边际税率.本文对拉弗曲线进行了较深入的分析,证明拉弗曲线在说明个人所得税边际税率与税收之间的关系时,存在一定的理论缺陷和局限性.中国个人所得税制应该加重高收入者税负,尽量不伤害中间阶层,减轻低收入者税负.     

个税免征额、税率与拉弗曲线

本文基于个人所得税改革对经济主体行为产生激励的理论,尝试将个税免征额引入拉弗曲线(Laffer curve),分析了收入变化时收入税率曲线位置的移动与拉弗曲线的形态变化,以及个税免征额与最优税率之间的运动规律,发现随着个税免征额的提高,最优税率有下降的趋势,对我国当前个税免征额的提高与税率级次级距调整现象做出了较严密的数理分析。而在分析个税免征额的选择及其与税率之间的关系时,为我们找到在当前地区收入水平不均与居民收入分布多样的状况下的最优个税免征额以及实践差别化税制的理论依据,回答了原来仅考虑税率变化的拉弗曲线所不能回答的问题。     

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.     

Identifying Laffer Bounds: A Sufficient‐Statistics Approach with an Application to Germany

We derive a simple sufficient‐statistics test for whether a nonlinear tax‐transfer system is second‐best Pareto efficient. If it is not, then it is beyond the top of the Laffer curve and there exists a tax cut that is self‐financing. The test depends on the income distribution, extensive and intensive labor supply elasticities, and income effect parameters. A tax‐transfer system is likely to be inefficient if marginal tax rates are quickly falling in income. We apply this test to the German tax‐transfer system, and we find that the structure of effective marginal tax rates is likely to be inefficient in the region where transfers are phased out.     

The relationship between tax rates and tax revenues in eurozone member countries - exploring the Laffer curve

We estimate Laffer Curves for direct and indirect taxes for each Eurozone country, using panel data from 1995 to 2011, by means of Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR) models. We choose the three taxes that contribute the most to the government tax revenue: the value added tax (VAT), the corporate income tax (CT), and the labour income tax (LT). From our estimated significant parameters, which have the expected signs according to the Laffer Curve theory, we obtained a maximum/optimal tax rate for VAT for Greece, Portugal, and Slovakia and for the majority of the Eurozone countries for direct taxes. We also take into consideration the business cycle. Many countries do not present differences in regime, and when they do, the optimal tax rate is higher during recessions. Finally, we compare the observed tax rates in 2012 to the estimated optimal tax rates, to assess if the 2012 policy was located at the prohibitive range of the Laffer Curve. Our results are important for the discussions about fiscal discipline and harmonization in the Eurozone, since they exhibit important disparities between countries and taxes. We can see that, especially for CT and LT, there is a strong divide between the values of the optimal maximum tax rates for Eastern European countries and Western European economies. Additionally, the economic and financial conditions of each country also influence the value for the tax rate.     

人力资本在农民增收中的作用分析

笔者采用一个农业大省的农户调查资料,分析了农村人力资本在农民收入增长中的作用。结论表明,家庭劳动力平均受教育年限显著增加农民人均纯收入;有劳动力接受过相关技术培训的家庭,人均纯收入显著高于没有劳动力接受过技术培训的家庭;家庭接受过技术培训的劳动力数量增加可以显著提高农民人均纯收入水平。     

品牌经济学的理论基础——引入品牌的需求曲线及其经济学分析

需求定律是经济学分析的理论基础之一,品牌经济学的理论基础为引入品牌的需求曲线或考虑选择成本的需求定律。把品牌引入经济学中后,品牌信用度的提高使需求曲线右移并变得更为陡峭,同时品牌信用度的提高改变了需求曲线的位置,使得均衡价格提高,均衡数量增加,增加了消费者剩余和生产者剩余,提高了社会福利水平。文章为“品牌战”替代“价格战”提供了理论依据,即通过品牌建设提高品牌信用度,使得在价格提高的条件下需求量增加,而这只有在需求曲线改变位置时方能做到。     

Minimum Wage Compliance and the Labor Demand Curve

Contrary to the traditional analysis of the employment effects of the minimum wage setting, the author shows that if compliance is contingent upon enforcement, complying with the minimum wage law involves a leftward shift of the labor demand curve rather than an upward movement along the curve. Furthermore, the labor demand curve will shift leftward with enforcement even if enforcement is insufficient to ensure compliance, becoming vertical when the options of compliance and noncompliance are equally attractive. Hence, it is not paying the statutory minimum wage that brings about a reduction in employment down to the full-compliance level but enforcement that, if sufficiently high, induces that same reduction in employment, even if the employer is still noncomplying with the minimum wage law.     

人力资本风险投资:一个人力资本持续投资的分析框架

市场经济条件下人力资本投资具有高风险性,如何促使人力资本各投资主体将更多的资本转移到人力资本投资领域并得以持续投资,显然需要一种新的理念,人力资本风险投资及其分析框架的构建是符合现阶段经济实际的一个重要命题假说。论文基于人力资本投资的不确定性和损失性,提出并界定人力资本风险投资概念,分析人力资本风险投资主体选择及其相互关系,着力构建人力资本风险投资周期及风险管理理论和技术模型,为人力资本投资风险分散提供一种新的分析框架。     

Vintage Human Capital, Demographic Trends, and Endogenous Growth

We study how economic growth is affected by demographics in an OLG model with a realistic survival law. Individuals optimally chose the dates at which they leave school to work and at which they retire. Endogenous growth arises thanks to the accumulation of generation-specific human capital. Favorable shifts in the survival probabilities induce longer schooling and later retirement but have an ambiguous effect on per-capita growth. The long-term relationship between fertility and per-capita growth is hump-shaped. Increases in longevity can be responsible for a switch from a no-growth regime to a sustained growth regime and for a positive relationship between fertility and growth to vanish. Solving numerically the equilibrium, demographic changes can have important medium-term effects even if long-term changes are very small. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: 041, I20, J10.     

库克曲线与中国人力资源管理

库克对研究生参加工作后,创造力在增长期过后出现下降并且低水平徘徊不前的现象作了描述。指出人员创造力的下降会造成人员流动和流失,这对企业的影响十分不利。因此企业人力资源管理工作应强化职业锚理论、压力管理、情感管理、企业文化和人力资源发展战略等方面工作。     

经理固守职位:基于人力资本专用性和专有性的分析

固守职位作为代理问题的一种表现,是指经理人应对公司内、外部控制机制以降低职位威胁的行为.从经理人力资本专用性和专有性角度对固守职位动机及其策略进行了分析.分析表明,经理专用性人力资本因其依赖于特定的企业组织,客观上构成了经理退出企业的障碍,导致经理人为了防止准租金消散和降低专用性人力资本遭到贬损,从而有动机地进行固守职位.固守职位策略的采取,就是经理实现其人力资本专有化的具体过程.     

Financial Student Aid and Enrollment in Higher Education: New Evidence from Germany*

Means‐tested student aid might affect enrollment in higher education. To derive the potential influence of student aid, we use a tax‐benefit microsimulation model. The effect is a non‐linear function of parental income, with variation as a result of bracket creeping and various reforms. Therefore, the effect of student aid on enrollment can be separated from the effects of income and other family characteristics. Using the German Socio‐Economic Panel, we find a small but significant positive effect, similar in size to the effects reported in previous studies for European countries but smaller than in the US.     

将消费看成是人力资本积累的一个来源及其意义--一个动态经济增长模型和基于中国数据的实证检验

本文发展了一个动态经济增长模型,发现消费与收入之间的短期关系非常不同于长期关系.相对于其他消费理论分析框架而言,该模型具有明显包容性,并与Granger-Engle非经典时间序列方法成功实现了"对接".凯恩斯边际消费倾向递减律、永久性收入假说、生命周期假说、随机游走假说,以及曼昆的λ假说等消费理论或假说,也都可以在这一框架下得到解释,或者说上述理论流派或假说都属于特例.实证分析结论不但支持该理论框架,而且比较恰当地刻画出了我国转型经济中的重大政策和制度变迁的影响.将消费看成是人力资本积累的一个来源,是解释消费与收入之间的短期非稳定关系和长期均衡关系的重要途径.在这个框架下也很容易认识到,从长期视野来看,公平与效率本质上存在一致性.对于寻求解决诸如扩大内需、社会主义新农村建设、集约增长方式选择等诸多中国当前面临的现实问题,以及有关发展政策、公共政策和宏观政策等而言,本文不失为一个具有启发意义的参考基准.     

R&D, Human Capital and International Technology Spillovers: A Cross-country Analysis

This paper is based on recent developments in the theory of innovation-driven growth that emphasize both the importance of R&D efforts — domestic as well as foreign — for explaining national productivity, and the complementarity between R&D and human capital investments. Estimates of specifications, in growth terms and in level terms, on a cross-section of OECD countries from the early 1960s to the early 1990s lend strong support to this thesis. The data show a significant influence of both domestic and foreign R&D. Moreover, there is clearly a net positive impact of human capital. The level and growth rate of human capital are shown to affect productivity growth and there is evidence of interaction with the catch-up process.
JEL classification: O 33; O 47     

News Sentiment: A New Yield Curve Factor

The authors show that sentiments from newspaper articles can explain and predict movements in the term structure of U.S. government bonds. This effect is stronger at the short end of the curve, coinciding with greater volatility and investors' need to continually reassess the Fed's reaction function. Facing such uncertainty, market participants rely on news and sentiment as a central element in their decision-making process. Considering this dependence, the authors propose a new yield curve factor—news sentiment—that is distinct from the 3 established yield curve factors (level, slope, and curvature) as well as from fundamental macroeconomic variables.     

On Impatience, Economic Growth and the Environmental Kuznets Curve: A Dynamic Analysis of Resource Management

The paper presents a dynamic analysis of natural resource management and investigates some key factors that affect optimal management and resource conservation.Using a recursive specification of time preferences, we show how endogenous discounting and impatience can affect the motivation for both capital investments and environmental preservation. We examine the relationships between economic growth and environmental quality. Endogenous discounting provides new insights in the economic dynamics underlying the environmental Kuznets curve. By treating growth as endogenous, we examine how externalities and economic growth interact with each other. We investigate how economic development can contribute to an increased demand for environmental preservation. As an important new result, we also show how poverty can contribute to environmental degradation.     

Some Reflections on the Teaching of Economics and Commerce in a Developing Country

The author, a teacher of economics and commercial subjects in Papua New Guinea which recently became independent, reports on the difficulties encountered in teaching these subjects in this developing country, where education of the western type is still associated in the minds of many with an aura of “cargo-cult” thinking. Other problems are the lack of textbooks in the language of the country, and the fact that the traditional beliefs of the majority of students run counter to principles of modern business and economics, making for a lack of even the most elementary economic understanding. Thus, the author believes, the transplanted course now being taught in Papua New Guinea cannot achieve the objective of providing basic economic understanding.

Mr. Smyth also suggests that the teacher “should be concerned with searching out those aspects of the traditional culture fhat can be used as ‘spring boards’ into a more complex study of the modem economy.”     

Schooling choices: Preferences, discount rates, and rates of return

This paper develops an empirical model to identify the structural parameters of schooling preferences and human capital production. Our model distinguishes between consumption and investment motives with regard to schooling. The results show that both motives matter. Preferences for schooling vary with social background and ability. Children from poorer social backgrounds and of lower ability have a lower preference for schooling. The discount rate that enters the net value of lifetime income varies with social background as well. The marginal rate of return to schooling decreases with ability and schooling. On average the marginal rate of return is 7.3 per cent, which can be contrasted with a `Mincerian' rate of return equal to 4.8 per cent. This indicates that the usual OLS estimate underestimates the true rate of return. First version received: November 1997/Final version received: February 1999     

人力资本、财务资本与资本结构：理论和实证

当今社会已经从工业经济迈进知识经济时代，现有以财务资本为研究对象的资本结构理论在解释咨询、高新技术等人力资本较为密集的公司时难免会捉襟见肘。视企业为财务资本与人力资本共同的投资组合是现代资本结构理论研究刻不容缓的任务。本文以现有财务资本结构的研究为基础，通过引入人力资本变量拓宽现代资本结构的内涵，构造债务、股权和人力资本三者之间相互关系和作用的数理模型，结合对我国计算机应用服务业的实证分析，得出结论和启示。