Optimal redistributive tax and education policies in general equilibrium

This paper studies optimal linear and non-linear income taxes and education subsidies in two-type models with endogenous human capital formation, endogenous labor supply, and endogenous wage rates. Assuming constant human capital elasticities, human capital investment should be efficient under optimal linear policies, whether general equilibrium effects are present or not. Hence, education subsidies should not be used for distributional reasons. Due to general equilibrium effects, optimal linear income taxes may even become negative. Optimal non-linear policies exploit general equilibrium effects for redistribution. The high-skilled type optimally has a negative marginal income tax rate and a positive marginal education subsidy. The low-skilled type optimally faces a positive marginal income tax rate and a marginal tax on education. Simulations demonstrate that general equilibrium effects have only a modest effect on optimal non-linear policies.     

Ending Food Subsidies: Nutritional, Welfare, and Budgetary Effects

Governments faced with growing budget deficits are cutting manysocial expenditures, including costly food subsidy programsthat have provided benefits to the rich and poor alike. Becausethe poor spend a larger share of their income on food than dothe rich, however, such cuts usually have negative distributional,welfare and nutritional effects. This article discusses themethodological issues in estimating the effects of price andtax reforms in developing countries. I apply a model that Deaton(1988) developed to estimate price elasticities from cross-sectiondata, the only reliable and detailed data available in mostdeveloping countries. I use measures of both real income andnutrition to evaluate the effects of changes in the Moroccanfood subsidy program. The analysis suggests that subsidies oninferior foods not consumed by the wealthy would reduce thewelfare costs to the poor and limit the budgetary expendituresrequired.     

On the optimal provision of social insurance: Progressive taxation versus education subsidies in general equilibrium

In this paper we compute the optimal tax and education policy transition in an economy where progressive taxes provide social insurance against idiosyncratic wage risk, but distort the education decision of households. Optimally chosen tertiary education subsidies mitigate these distortions. We highlight the quantitative importance of general equilibrium feedback effects from policies to relative wages of skilled and unskilled workers: subsidizing higher education increases the share of workers with a college degree thereby reducing the college wage premium which has important redistributive benefits. We also argue that a full characterization of the transition path is crucial for policy evaluation. We find that optimal education policies are always characterized by generous tuition subsidies, but the optimal degree of income tax progressivity depends crucially on whether transitional costs of policies are explicitly taken into account and how strongly the college premium responds to policy changes in general equilibrium.     

农村居民养老保险财政补贴与农民家庭消费异质性——基于CHARLS数据的研究

基于2011年和2013年两期CHARLS数据构建面板数据模型，分析农村居民养老保险制度中央财政“一刀切”的基础养老金补贴政策与地方财政差异化的缴费补贴政策对农民家庭消费的异质性影响。结果显示：财政补贴有利于整体促进参保农民家庭消费支出，尤其对已领取养老金的家庭，消费增进效应更明显；对于未领取养老金的参保农民家庭，却具有抑制效应。从不同收入阶层和不同地区来看，农村居民养老保险财政补贴对低、中、高收入阶层农民家庭消费的影响依次减弱，对东部、西部、中部地区农民家庭消费的影响依次增强。因此，加大财政补贴力度、优化补贴方式、扩展筹资渠道、强化制度联动能更好地发挥财政补贴改善社会福利的作用。     

Growth, Income Inequality, and Fiscal Policy: What Are the Relevant Trade-offs?

We develop an endogenous growth model with elastic labor supply, in which agents differ in their initial endowments of physical capital. In this context, the growth rate and the distribution of income are jointly determined. We then examine the distributional impact of different ways of financing an investment subsidy. Policies aimed at increasing the growth rate result in a more unequal distribution of pre-tax income, consistent with the positive correlation between income inequality and growth observed in the recent empirical literature. However, there is no conflict between efficiency and equity if inequality is measured in terms of the distribution of welfare.     

论对低保户进行分类管理的必要性与可行性

由于缺乏一套有效的收入监测机制,低保户隐性收入很难核实,导致低保户是＂只进不退＂,随之而来的是通过骗取低保户资格以享受低保金待遇的骗保行为日趋严重。本文建议借鉴中国银监会主席刘明康＂不看报表看三表＂的思路,通过水、电、气消耗多少来间接核查低保户的准确收入,以便使己不符合低保资格的低保户退保。同时建议根据低保户的收入状况,把低保户分为A、B、C三类来管理,低保金及优惠救助政策也分成三档,这样就可以参照当地低保待遇标准,实行低保金差（缺）额发放,差（缺）多少就发多少,这不仅可节省低保金,有助控制和减少骗保行为,还可使低保户成为节能减排的＂急先锋＂和＂排头兵＂。     

Education policies and optimal taxation

This paper studies the design of education policies in a setting in which optimal redistributive labor taxation is available. It is usually argued that the crucial parameter to guide education policy is the complementarity of education and ability. This is true only when labor supply is fixed or when income taxes are not allowed. I show that, if labor supply is endogenous and if the government can tax income in a nonlinear way, the crucial parameter is how the education elasticity of wage changes with ability. Taking the elasticity criterion into account, education subsidies are optimal in cases in which, under the complementarity criterion, education taxes would be optimal. To do this, I use an asymmetric information setting that motivates nonlinear taxation of income and education. JEL Classification H21 · H23 · H52 · I28     

Second-best income taxation and education policy with endogenous human capital and borrowing constraints

We formulate a two-period life cycle model of saving, labor supply, and human capital investment when individuals differ in their ability and initial wealth. Borrowing constraints result in sub-optimal choices for consumption and investments in human capital. We analyze optimal linear income taxes and education subsidies. The optimal income tax is shown to be positive—even in the absence of any redistributional concerns. A redistributive income tax relaxes borrowing constraints by redistributing resources from the unconstrained to the borrowing constrained stages of the life cycle. The income tax thus alleviates preexisting non-tax distortions in the capital market. Human capital is subsidized on a net basis in the absence of redistributional concerns. Education subsidies help to relax credit constraints and to reduce distortions from explicit and implicit taxes on human capital formation. When redistributional concerns are present, education is subsidized more if this helps to alleviate distortions on labor supply, but is subsidized less if education subsidies have a very regressive incidence. Simulations demonstrate that optimal income taxes are substantially higher when credit constraints are present. Education is generally subsidized on a net basis, and the more so if credit constraints are more severe.     

Welfare to Work,Wages and Wage Growth*

This paper attempts to uncover the effects of a UK welfare‐to‐work programme on individual wage growth by exploiting an expansion to this welfare programme. The conventional wisdom is that such programmes trap recipients into low‐wage, low‐quality work – this comes from the simple argument that the ‘poverty trap’, which a wage subsidy for low‐income workers induces, reduces the benefits to investments, such as on‐the‐job training, and so reduces wage growth. In fact, a wage subsidy will also reduce the costs of, at least, general training because we would normally expect workers to pay for their own general training in the form of lower gross wages. So a wage subsidy is a way of sharing these costs with the taxpayer. Thus, the net effect on wage progression depends on whether it reduces costs by more or less than it reduces the benefits.     

Pareto-improving bequest taxation

Altruistic parents may transfer resources to their offspring by providing education, and by leaving bequests. We show that in the presence of wage taxation, a small bequest tax may improve efficiency in an overlapping-generations framework with only intended bequests, by enhancing incentives of parents to invest in their children’s education. We also calculate an optimal mix of wage and bequest taxes with alternative parameter combinations. In all cases, the optimal wage tax rate is clearly higher than the optimal bequest tax rate, but the latter is generally positive when the required government revenue in the economy is sufficiently high. If educational investment is partly unobservable for the government, these results qualitatively hold also when allowing for education subsidies.     

Migration and Social Replacement Incomes: How to Protect Low-Income Workers in the Industrialized Countries Against the Forces of Globalization and Market Integration

This paper discusses how an industrialized country could defend the living standard of its unskilled workers against the wage competition from immigrants. It shows that fixing social replacement incomes implies migration into unemployment. Defending wages with replacement incomes brings about first order efficiency losses that approximate the budget cost of the government. By contrast, wage subsidies involve much smaller welfare losses. While the exclusion of migrants from a national wage replacement program does not avoid the distortions in labor migration, the (temporary) exclusion of migrants from a national wage subsidy program makes it possible to reach the first best migration pattern despite the preservation of the welfare state.JEL Code: F15, F22, I38, H5, J61     

Unequal wages for equal utilities

When educational policy is supplemented by a redistributive income tax, and when individuals differ in their ability to benefit from education, the optimal policy is typically rather regressive. Resources are concentrated on the most able individuals in order to get a “cake” as big as possible to share among individuals through income taxation. In this paper, we put forward another reason to push for regressive education. It is not linked to heterogeneity in innate ability but to the property that welfare may be a convex function of an individual’s wage. For simplicity, we assume a linear education technology and a given education budget. To give the equal wage outcome the best chance to emerge, we also assume that individuals have identical learning abilities. Nevertheless, it turns out that in the first-best wage inequality is always preferable to wage equality. Even more surprisingly, this conclusion remains valid in the second-best when the feasible degree of wage differentiation is sufficiently large. This is in spite of the fact that wage equalization would eliminate any need for distortionary income taxation.     

企业出口与工资差距——来自中国制造业的证据

从世界银行企业投资调查数据中可以发现,中国出口企业内部的工资差距高于非出口企业.由于处在生产技术结构与所在地区比较优势更为接近的行业中的企业,在没有保护和补贴的情况下具有自生能力,能够获得较高的剩余,所以这类企业在开放竞争的条件下资本积累速度更快,在资本技术互补的假设下,增加了对更高技能劳动力的需求.出口对企业内高级管...     

Optimal subsidies and guarantees in public–private partnerships

In this paper, we analyse how certain subsidies and guarantees given to private firms in public–private partnerships should be optimally arranged to promote immediate investment in a real options framework. We show how an investment subsidy, a revenue subsidy, a minimum demand guarantee, and a rescue option could be optimally arranged to induce immediate investment, compensating for the value of the option to defer. These four types of incentives produce significantly different results when we compare the value of the project after the incentive structure is devised and also when we compare the timing of the resulting cash flows.     

Can a Shorter Workweek Induce Higher Employment? Mandatory Reductions in the Workweek and Employment Subsidies

This paper presents a unified model of the impact on employment of a mandatory reduction in work hours in combination with an employment subsidy to reduce quasi-fixed costs of employment, while attempting to maintain worker's take-home pay or welfare level. Achieving the dual policy objectives of enhancing employment and maintaining worker income is not necessarily feasible. Nevertheless, a reduction in the legal workweek may induce a degree of downward wage flexibility, while an employment subsidy to firms accommodates downward wage rigidity. It may be possible, therefore, to increase employment with a policy that combines a reduction in the workweek with an employment subsidy. In general, however, the long run employment outcome is ambiguous, and a decline in output cannot be ruled out. More direct policy measures whose impact can be assessed with greater certainty—in particular, removing structural rigidities in the labor market—should be given priority to decrease long term unemployment.     

Housing Finance GSEs: Who Gets the Subsidy?

Taxpayer subsidies that flow toward housing-finance GSEs are implicit in nature. This makes the size and distribution of subsidy values hard to measure directly. An array of indirect analyses indicates that incentive-conflicted GSE managers can and do extract substantial annual subsidies for GSE stockholders. Currently, stockholders are allowed to encourage managers to exploit taxpayers by tying incentive compensation implicitly to increases in the discounted present value of expected future subsidies. To counteract this inappropriate incentive, managers should be made accountable to taxpayers for returning all compensation that can be fairly attributed to increases in subsidies captured by GSE stockholders.     

补“砖头”、补“床头”还是补“人头”——基于浙江省某县养老机构的个案调查

本文通过对浙江省某县1家公办养老机构和1家民办养老机构的个案调查,探讨政府养老机构补贴政策的实施效果,并提出进一步改进补贴政策的建议。调查发现,该公办养老机构收费标准较低,其经营收入不仅低于完全成本,而且低于经营成本,政府通过多种形式对其建设和经营进行了"隐性补贴",这部分补贴事实上由实际入住的老年人所享受,而大部分最终入住该公办养老机构的老年人并非最需要得到补贴的低收入失能老年人。近年来,浙江省对民办养老机构实行按床位补贴建设费用的支持政策。作者对1家在上述政策背景下新成立的民办养老机构的调查发现,床位补贴政策的确一定程度上提高了民间开办养老机构的热情,但也还存在床位空置率高等问题。基于上述调研上,作者提出对低收入失能老人实行养老服务需方补贴,同时逐步减少对公办养老机构的运营和建设补贴,对民办养老机构根据其收养的低收入失能老年人人数实行运营补贴等建议。     

新型农村社会养老保险财政补贴机制优化研究

构建科学合理的财政补贴机制对于已经实现全覆盖的财政补贴型新型农村社会养老保险制度的可持续运行至关重要。现行补贴机制存在基础养老金补贴方式不合理、地方财政负担不均衡和地方财政补贴不规范等主要问题。基于此,文章设计了"定率补贴+分层筹资"的补贴机制,评估结论显示新补贴机制实现了地方政府财政补贴规模与财政能力的优化匹配、平衡了政府与个人的责任分担和有利于养老保险关系的城乡转续。     

地区补贴差异、农民决策分化与农业保险福利再分配

受区域经济发展水平的制约,农业保险的补贴力度存在明显的地区差异:东部发达地区财政对农业保险的补贴力度大,而中西部欠发达地区受自身财政实力的制约补贴力度十分有限.补贴力度的不同将会影响农民参加农业保险的意愿,进而影响他们的生产决策,并最终影响到全体农民的福利分配.应发挥中央财政的调节作用,加大对中西部地区农业保险的扶持力...     

Debt, taxes, and international equilibrium

This paper employs an extended Miller model to analyze capital structure decisions of individual firms in a two-country setting. Miller equilibria are generally not consistent with an international equilibrium if the tax subsidy of debt differs across countries. The most obvious reason for differential tax subsidies is differences between national corporate tax rates. We also identify differential tax subsidies of debt if inflation rates differ across countries. For both cases we examine the adjustment process from national equilibria to an international equilibrium without and with barriers to international investment. We derive the relationship between the equilibrium yields on debt and equity in the two countries and discuss the Fisher hypothesis that real returns do not depend upon inflation in a two-country Miller world.