Cash-on-hand and demand for credit

Subprime consumers often use small-dollar credit products, such as payday loans, to meet short-term financial needs over pay cycles. However, relatively little is known about the income sensitivity of demand for credit in this market. This paper provides a causal estimate of the effect of tax rebates on the demand for small-dollar credit, using a unique proprietary loan-level dataset. Identification relies on variation in state Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) generosity for areas within the same commuting zones that span state borders. The results show that a $100 increase in EITC benefits leads to an 8.3% reduction in the number of loan applications and a 6.6% reduction in the number of borrowers. This could translate into sizable reductions in loan volume and savings in financial charges. More broadly, the results suggest that public programs with income benefits could help recipients with consumption smoothing in the presence of credit market frictions.     

Labour-supply impacts of effective welfare programme parameters: a reanalysis

We quantify the impact of effective welfare programme parameters on the labour supply of single female household heads – the primary group of welfare recipients in the USA. Our panel of data is derived from the US Census Bureau's Current Population Survey for the years 1979 to 1990 inclusive. Behavioural impacts from a range of economic variables are consistent in sign with predictions made by economic theory. We find that effective welfare gurantee levels and the effective tax rate on earned income both significantly decrease labour supply. The marginal effects of these welfare programme parameters are economically small: a US$1000 increase in the expected welfare guarantee level reduces annual labour supply by about 36 hours; a 10 percentage point increase in the effective tax rate on earned income reduces annual labour supply by about 7.5 hours.     

Distortionary company car taxation: deadweight losses through increased car ownership

We analyse the effects of distortionary company car taxation through increased household car consumption for the Netherlands. We use several identification strategies and demonstrate that for about 20 % of households company car possession increases car ownership. The annual welfare loss of distortionary company taxation through increased car ownership is generally rather small, maximally €120 per company car, and much less than the welfare loss through increased expenditure on the company car. However, for policies that exempt households from paying tax on their company car, the annual deadweight loss is likely higher. Our first-best tax policy recommendation is to increase company car tax rates. However, our current results suggest that a second-best policy, which keeps average company car taxation constant but which reduces the marginal tax on cheaper cars and increases the marginal tax on expensive cars, would be welfare improving as overconsumption of company cars will be reduced.     

Tax Policy and Human Capital Formation with Public Investment in Education

This paper studies the effects of distortionary taxes and public investment in an endogenous growth OLG model with knowledge transmission. Fiscal policy affects growth in two respects: first, work time reacts to variations of prospective tax rates and modifies knowledge formation; second, public spending enhances labour efficiency but also stimulates physical capital through increased savings. It is shown that Ramsey-optimal policies reduce savings due to high tax rates on young generations, and are not necessarily growth-improving with respect to a pure private system. Non-Ramsey policies that shift the burden on adults are always growth-improving due to crowding-in effects: the welfare of all generations is unambiguously higher with respect to a private system, and there generally exists a continuum of non-optimal tax rates under which long-run growth and welfare are higher than with the Ramsey-optimal policy.     

Electronic filing,tax preparers and participation in the Earned Income Tax Credit

In 2002 more than 18 million low-income individual taxpayers received the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). Despite its size, non-participation in this program is a concern and substantial effort is devoted by the IRS, local governments and many non-profits to address it. Using variation across states in the introduction of state electronic filing programs, we show that the introduction of electronic filing had a significant effect on participation in the EITC. Our results are robust to accounting for other welfare, EITC and IRS reforms introduced during the same period. We speculate that the impact of this policy change on the tax preparation industry played an important role in increasing participation.     

Expanding New York State's Earned Income Tax Credit Programme: the effect on work,income and poverty

Given its favourable employment incentives and ability to target the working poor, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) has become the primary antipoverty programme at both the federal and state levels. However, when evaluating the effect of EITC programmes on income and poverty, governments generally calculate the effect using simple accounting, where the value of the state or federal EITC benefit is added to a person's income. These calculations omit the behavioural incentives created by the existence of these programmes, the corresponding effect on labour supply and hours worked, and therefore the actual effect on income and poverty. This article simulates the full effect of an expansion of the New York State EITC benefit on employment, hours worked, income, poverty and programme expenditures. These results are then compared to those omitting labour supply effects. Relative to estimates excluding labour supply effects, the preferred behavioural results show that an expansion of the New York State EITC increases employment by an additional 14?244 persons, labour earnings by an additional $95.8 million, family income by an additional $84.5 million, decreases poverty by an additional 56?576 persons and increases costs to the State by $29.7 million.     

Corporate Tax Incentives for R&D Investment in OECD Countries

Differentiating internal equity from debt finance, this study examines the generosity of R&D-specific tax incentives in OECD countries based on an NPV model. The corporate tax system generally favours debt finance and some previous findings on the possible preponderance of internal equity for financing R&D investment cannot be explained in relation to R&D-specific tax concessions. The OECD comparison demonstrates that R&D tax allowances adopted in the Czech Republic, Belgium, the UK, Denmark, Hungary, Austria and Australia generated the most substantial tax savings in 2006. Combined with such incentives, the after-tax NPV increases with the corporate tax rate, suggesting stronger investment stimulation through a tax-rate-increase-cum-base-broadening policy.     

The integration of child tax credits and welfare: Evidence from the Canadian National Child Benefit program

In 1998, the Canadian government introduced a new child tax credit. The innovation in the program was its integration with social assistance (welfare). Some provinces agreed to subtract the new federally-paid benefits from provincially-paid social assistance, partially lowering the welfare wall. Other provinces did not integrate benefits, providing a quasi-experimental framework for estimation. We find large changes in social assistance take-up and employment in provinces that provided the labour market incentives to do so. In our sample, the integration of benefits can account for between 19 and 27% of the decline in social assistance receipt between 1997 and 2000.     

The choice of excise taxes when savings and labour decisions are distorted

The framework is a simple two period life-cycle model with identical individuals who work in period 1 and are retired in period 2. Initially there are optimally chosen uniform income and commodity tax rates, which lead to distortions in both the labour/leisure choice and the consumption/savings choice. The purpose is to demonstrate in an intuitively comprehensible way how differentiating commodity taxation by slightly increasing the tax on one consumption good can mitigate existing distortions. The sufficient conditions for a welfare improvement are similar to that of Corlett and Hague plus some conditions on average and marginal consumption propensities.     

Analysing Recent Changes in Indigenous and Non‐Indigenous Australians' Income: A Synthetic Panel Approach

Data from the 1986, 1991 and 1996 censuses are used to conduct a synthetic cohort analysis of the income distributions for Indigenous and non‐Indigenous males and females. The advantage of this approach is that statistical techniques can be used to control for unobservable differences between the Indigenous and non‐Indigenous populations, such as ability and schooling quality, as well as assimilation, discrimination and other attitudes. The results demonstrate that the failure to control for unobserved differences in existing studies of Indigenous income will induce a significant bias in both empirical and policy analysis. Trends in relative income are also identified and are related to broad changes in labour force status. The deliberate policy shift in the early 1990s to paying welfare to individuals (‘individualisation’) has resulted in an increase in financial independence among many females. The other insight from the analysis is that the generosity of welfare payments or improved targeting of benefits has materially advantaged extremely poor Indigenous people. While this is a positive outcome in its own right, policy also needs to take into account the interaction between tax, welfare, productivity and incentives to work.     

Earned Income Tax Credits: Do They Have Any Role to Play in Australia?

Earned income tax credits (EITCs) have been used mainly in the United States. The Australian tax–transfer system is already very complicated and the aims of the EITC—notably reductions in effective tax rates for low income earners—might be achievable through reforms to existing components of the system. Such tax rates can be lowered either through reductions in social security tapers, or reductions in income tax payable. Action to reduce tapers affecting families is already proceeding through the social security component of the Government's tax reform package. To go further, by reducing tapers on the main allowances, like Newstart Allowance and Parenting Payment, would accelerate developments for such allowances to become forms of wage supplementation for the low paid. If it were not desired to go further down this path (and it does have problems), then relief of income tax burdens could be implemented through changes to the rate structure. While the EITC may make sense in the US context, a country with a well-developed welfare system like that of Australia has other options. In particular any EITC in this country is likely to be a supplement, not an alternative, to existing cash support for low income families.     

Tax reforms under market distortions in product and labour markets

Using a two-agent model comprised of capitalists and workers, this paper examines the importance of imperfect competition in product and labour markets in determining the welfare effects of tax reform. The reform considered consists of eliminating the capital tax alongside a concurrent rise in the labour tax. In contrast to the perfectly competitive model, models with product or labour market failures each result in welfare losses for the workers in the long-run. In a realistic calibration to the UK economy, combining these imperfections implies that this tax reform will be Pareto improving in the long-run. However, these welfare gains over longer time horizons come at the cost of short-run losses, which, consistent with previous research, result in welfare losses for workers post-reform.     

Capital income taxation,tax criteria,and intergenerational welfare

In a two-period overlapping-generations model, residence criteria are shown to be optimal with lump-sum transfers to the younger generation in a dynamically efficient open economy even if all wage income, corresponding to rent income under exogenous labor supply, is not taxed away. When tax revenues are also distributed to the older generation — which indeed may be desirable for short-term intergenerational welfare distribution reasons — a weighted average rule is derived for optimal international taxation. The taxation of domestic savings income follows the inverse elasticity rule in respect to savings and, surprisingly, higher investment elasticity increases the tax level. Finally, for a small open economy and for large identical economies, tax competition with a mixed scheme of residence-based taxes and source-based subsidies yields the same tax policy as tax cooperation with no restrictions on the domestic and international capital income tax instruments.     

The dynamic effects of tax policies in a small open economy

We develop an intertemporal optimizing model of a small open economy with both durable and nondurable consumption to address the implications of alternative tax policies. An increase in lump sum taxes reduces the steady state level of consumption and improves the stock of foreign bonds. Consistent with empirical evidence, durable consumption exhibits initial excess volatility. Though an increase in the tax on durables increases the demand for nondurables and improves the bond holdings in the steady state, an increase in the tax on nondurables has insignificant effects on the stock of foreign bonds and the consumption of durables. Using quarterly data from the UK and estimating generalized impulse response functions we find empirical support. We also calibrate the welfare implications of different tax policies.     

Household Transport Demand in a CGE-framework

The main objective of this study is to improve the modelling of household demand for transport services in a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model. The new extended model is then used for numerical calculations to test how the Swedish economy reacts to a carbon target. Special attention will be given to distributional effects and the connection between labour supply and work journeys in a sparsely populated country like Sweden. A differentiation between trip purposes and trip length, a complementary relationship between work journeys and labour supply, and a subdivision of households by density of population and income influence the numerical results. Our main conclusions from the analysis of a carbon target are that if the carbon tax revenue is recycled by decreasing the employers’ social contribution fee, welfare costs are lower than with lump-sum replacements of tax revenue to households. The welfare cost may be reduced even further if work journeys are not additionally taxed as compared to the base year. However, the lower total welfare cost is obtained at the expense of making society more unequal, since both labour tax recycling (cuts in employers’ social contributions) and exempting tax on work journeys will make low income groups carry a higher burden. An increased carbon dioxide tax is also shown to increase welfare differences between sparsely populated areas and city regions in Sweden.      

What drives housing dynamics in China? A sign restrictions VAR approach

We study housing dynamics in China using vector autoregressions identified with theory-consistent sign restrictions. We study seven potential drivers: (1) population increases; (2) a relaxation of credit standards, for example, due to the shadow banking system; (3) increasing preferences towards housing, for example, due to a housing bubble, or to housing being a status asset in the marriage market; (4) an increase in the savings rate; (5) expected productivity progress; (6) changes in land supply; and (7) tax policy, a proxy for policy stimulus. Our results show that, even if all shocks play relevant roles, productivity, savings glut, and policy stimulus have been the dominant drivers. When the sample is closer to 2014, housing preferences and credit shocks increase their importance to explain house prices and volume, while population shocks explain a larger share of the dynamics of residential investment. The results show some differences if we use house price indices constructed by the government or by private sources. The official indices show smaller increases in house prices and assign a smaller role to credit and preference shocks.     

Strategies for Fiscal Reform in the Context of the EMU: the Case of Portugal

The authors use an endogenous growth dynamic general‐equilibrium model, which accommodates the institutional constraints of the Stability and Growth Pact, to study tax reform in Portugal. Simulation results suggest that tax cuts financed in a nondistortionary way increase long‐term GDP; i.e., they are efficiency improving, but do not always increase welfare. The tradeoff between efficiency and welfare is alleviated when reductions in public spending or increased public indebtedness finance the tax cuts. Since these mechanisms are not realistic under the institutional setting of the Stability and Growth Pact, tax reform in Portugal must involve trading off distortionary tax margins. In this case, the best strategy to increase both efficiency and welfare is to increase investment tax credits and finance them either through personal income taxes or through employers’ social security contributions.     

Green Tax Reform and Competitiveness

This paper studies a revenue-neutral green tax reform that substitutes energy for wage taxes in an open economy with unemployment. As long as the labour tax rate exceeds the energy tax rate, such a reform will increase employment, reduce the domestic firms' unit cost of production and hence increase international competitiveness and output of the economy. The driving force behind these results is the technological substitution process that a green tax reform will bring about. The resulting reduction in unemployment is welfare increasing since energy, which the country has to buy at its true national opportunity cost, is replaced with labour, whose price is above its social opportunity cost.     

Tax distortions, household production, and black-market work

This paper studies an economy with high- and low-productivity households. Household services are produced either by households themselves or are purchased in a white or black market. Black market work is inefficient (efficient) when it otherwise would have been done in the white market (within the household). With low (high) tax wedges, the black market reduces (increases) welfare by competing with white-market production (own-household production). With intermediate tax wedges, the welfare effect of a black market is ambiguous: welfare is improved (reduced) when black services are demanded by low- (high-) productivity households. An increase in the tax wedge may then reduce the benefits from a black service market.     

Tax reform in a two-class growth model

This paper analyzes the welfare and distributional effects of tax reforms in a two-class model with exogenous labour supply. It extends the empirically calibrated, standard life-cycle model to include both pure life-cycle savers and households with an altruistic bequest motive. The tax reform simulations cover the move from an income to a wage and a consumption tax, respectively. The role of borrowing constraints is studied and a dynamic analysis of tax reforms using a static expectation approach is performed. The simulation results indicate that the two tax reforms have different impacts on the welfare of the two classes: while the pure life-cycle savers are better off with the consumption tax, the altruistically motivated households gain more under a wage tax. The results further show that while the introduction of a consumption tax is distributionally neutral, the move to a wage tax substantially increases income and wealth inequality.