Efficiency and the optimal direction of federal-state transfers

It seems to be widely believed that the case for centralizing revenue-raising is stronger than that for centralizing expenditure decisions, so that federal governments should typically make transfers to lower-level (state) governments. This paper argues, however, that pure efficiency considerations may plausibly point in exactly the opposite direction. This arises because of a vertical fiscal externality: the typical state may neglect the impact that its tax decisions have on the federal tax base. The optimal federal response is to internalize this distortion of state decisions by means of offsetting subsidy on the common tax base, the financing of which may plausibly require transfers from the states.     

Fiscal hedging with nominal assets

We analyze optimal fiscal and monetary policy in an economy with distortionary labor income taxes, nominal rigidities, nominal debt of various maturities and short-selling constraints. Optimal policy prescribes the almost exclusive use of long term debt. Such debt mitigates the distortions associated with hedging fiscal shocks by allowing the government to allocate them efficiently across states and periods.     

On the International Dimension of Fiscal Policy

This paper analyzes the international dimension of fiscal policy in a small open economy framework. We consider the case in which the government finances its spending by levying distortionary taxes and issuing state‐contingent debt. While in a closed economy taxes are essentially invariant, in an open economy taxes can be as volatile as output. This is because the presence of a terms of trade externality introduces efficient fluctuations in the consumption–leisure wedge driven by movements in the real exchange rate. As a result, the optimal fiscal rule suggests that taxes should be varied to replicate these fluctuations.     

Fiscal externalities and the design of intergovernmental grants

This paper describes the tax and expenditure externalities that can occur in a federation, focusing on the (relatively neglected) vertical tax and expenditure externalities which arise when state governments' tax and expenditure decisions affect the federal government's budget constraint and vice versa. Formulas are derived for matching grants which correct the distortions in governments' decision-making caused by fiscal externalities. With vertical tax externalities, the matching revenue grant may result in transfers from the state government to the federal government. With vertical expenditure externalities, the federal government should provide a matching expenditure grant equal to the additional federal revenue that is generated from an additional dollar spent by a state on productivityenhancing activities such as education.     

我国转轨时期财政转移支付制度的目标体系及其分层问题

政府设计实施转移支付制度有着多重目标:实现纵、横平衡和矫正外溢及其他经济政治目标,这些目标之间相互联系、相互制约.规范的转移支付所追求的终极目标是区域间财政能力或公共服务水平均等化,但在实施过程中不同阶段不同时期对不同项目应分别制定不同的标准.我国现阶段政府转移支付的具体政策目标既受政府转移支付的最终目标制约,更服从于现阶段的国家宏观经济社会目标.     

MIGRATION into the WELFARE STATE: tax and migration competition

Despite big gains from easing restrictions on international labor mobility, liberalizing migration flows is not pursued unilaterally or negotiated among countries in a way that international trade negotiations are pursued. Among several key explanations is the fiscal burden imposed by immigration on native-born. The paper focuses on a central tension faced by policy makers in countries that receive migrants from lower wage countries. Such countries are typically high productivity and capital rich, and the resulting high wages attract both skilled and unskilled migrants. A generous welfare state may attract low-skill migration deter skilled migration, since it is likely to be accompanied by higher redistributive taxes. Assuming that a group of host countries faces an upward supply of immigrants, the analysis demonstrates that tax competition does not indeed lead to a race to the bottom; competition may lead to higher taxes than coordination. There exists a fiscal externality (fiscal leakage) that causes tax rates (on both labor and capital), and the volume of migration (of both skill types), to be higher in the competitive regime than in the coordinated regime.     

Fiscal sustainability and demographic change: a micro-approach for 27 EU countries

The effect of demographic change on the labor force and on fiscal revenues is topical in light of potential pension shortfalls. This paper evaluates the effect of demographic changes between 2010 and 2030 on labor force participation and government budgets in the EU-27. Our analysis involves the incorporation of population projections, and an explicit modeling of the supply and demand side of the labor market. Our approach overcomes key shortcomings of most existing studies that focus only on labor supply when assessing the effects of policy reforms. Ignoring wage reactions greatly understates the increase in fiscal revenues, suggesting that fiscal strain from demographic change might be less severe than currently perceived. Beyond, our micro-based approach captures the impact on fiscal revenues more accurately than previous studies. Finally, as a policy response to demographic change and worsening fiscal budgets, we simulate the increase in the statutory retirement age. Our policy simulations confirm that raising the statutory retirement age can balance fiscal budgets in the long run.     

Tax buyouts

The paper studies a fiscal policy instrument that can reduce fiscal distortions without affecting revenues, in a politically viable way. The instrument is a private contract (tax buyout), offered by the government to each citizen, whereby the citizen can choose to pay a fixed price in exchange for a given reduction in her tax rate for a period of time. We introduce the tax buyout in a dynamic overlapping generations economy, calibrated to match several features of the US income, taxes and wealth distribution. Under simple pricing, the introduction of the buyout is revenue neutral but, by reducing distortions, benefits a significant fraction of the population and leads to sizable increases in aggregate labor supply, income and consumption.     

Optimal Fiscal Policy with Consumption Taxation

We characterize optimal fiscal policies in a general equilibrium model with monopolistic competition and endogenous public spending. The government can tax consumption, as alternative to labor income taxes. Consumption taxation acts as indirect taxation of profits (intratemporal gains of taxing consumption) and enables the policymaker to manage the burden of public debt more efficiently (intertemporal gains of taxing consumption). We show analytically that these two gains imply that the optimal share of government spending is higher under consumption taxation than with labor income taxation. Then, we quantify numerically each of these gains by calibrating the model on the U.S. economy.     

Optimal Fiscal and Monetary Policy in Customer Markets

We present a model in which some goods trade in “customer markets” and advertising facilitates long‐lived relationships. We estimate the model on U.S. data and find a large congestion externality in the pricing of customer market goods. This motivates the analysis of optimal policy. Under a complete set of taxes, fiscal policy eliminates the externalities with large adjustments in tax rates on customer markets goods, while labor tax volatility remains low. Constraining the instruments to the interest rate and labor tax, the optimal labor tax displays large and procyclical fluctuations, but monetary policy is little changed compared to a model with no customer markets.     

从增值税改革试点谈财政政策有效性

本文重点分析了财政政策对宏观经济调整的作用,指出财政政策的有效性除受到财政收支规模及结构合理性影响外,还取决于传导机制是否顺畅。同时,政府还需要解决好在分税制下中央和地方财权的分配,以及财政政策和货币政策组合的问题。     

消费者意愿及地方政府行为对农户种植行为的影响机制

基于"经济人"假设和外部性原理,建立政府、农户及消费者之间的三方博弈模型,考量地方政府检查策略下的生态补贴与惩罚措施以及质量标签策略对农户种植行为的影响行为.结果表明:地方政府的生态补贴政策与农药超标罚款政策对农户的生态种植行为具有促进作用,其监管效率受上级政府检查力度以及社会舆论的影响;而实施质量标签策略可以提升农户选择生态种植行为的收益,促使农户种植行为的选择转变;消费者对质量安全的敏感性会提高其进行生态产品购买的动因,倒逼农户进行生态种植.     

Inflation Taxation and Welfare with Externalities and Leisure

This paper examines how inflation taxation affects resource allocation and welfare in a neoclassical growth model with leisure, a production externality and money in the utility function. Switching from consumption taxation to inflation taxation to finance government spending reduces real money balances relative to income, but increases consumption, labor, capital, and output. The net welfare effect of this switch depends crucially on the strength of the externality and on the elasticity of intertemporal substitution. While it is always negative without the externality, it is likely to be positive with a strong externality and elastic intertemporal substitution.     

A case for taxing education

In this paper we establish, contrary to conventional wisdom, a case for taxing education, as a supplement to the labor income tax, by drawing on some informational feature of education, which the government may utilize. Discretionary decisions of individuals to acquire education may serve as an additional signal (to earned labor income) on the underlying unobserved innate earning ability, thereby mitigating the informational constraint faced by the government. JEL Classification H2 · D6     

Tax competition and tax base equalization in the presence of multiple tax instruments

The literature on tax competition has argued that tax base equalization, which reduces regional disparities in tax bases, can serve as a means of internalizing horizontal and vertical fiscal externalities. This argument assumes that each government relies on a single tax base (a regional tax on mobile capital and a federal tax on savings). This paper considers the case in which a distortionary labor tax is also available. Internalizing fiscal externalities requires that while the regional capital tax base is fully equalized, a region’s equalization entitlement for the labor tax is positive when its tax base is “larger” than the average tax base of all regions. This efficient tax base equalization system is incompatible with the primary objective of fiscal equalization.

     

劳动力异质性与城乡收入差距实证分析

本文主要研究了当存在劳动力异质性时城乡收入差距的动态特征,通过建立无限生命周期（Ramsey）模型,讨论了个人劳动能力随机性差异经济中收入差距的动态演化问题,并基于我国部分地区省级面板数据,构建计量模型实证考察了存在劳动力异质性时,财政支出结构对城乡收入差距的影响。研究表明,当存在劳动力异质性时,不同的财政支出政策会导致城乡收入差距的差异性变化,社会收入流动性下降,经济中存在一个稳定均衡的持续性不平等状态。     

Fiscal-monetary policy interactions in the presence of unionized labor markets

This paper develops a framework for studying the interactions between labor unions, fiscal policy, monetary policy and monopolistically competitive firms. The framework is used to investigate the effects of labor taxes, the replacement ratio, labor market institutions and monetary policymaking institutions on economic peformance in the presence of strategic interactions between labor unions and the central bank. Given fiscal variables, higher levels of either centralization of wage bargaining, or of central bank conservativeness are associated with lower unemployment and inflation. However the forward shifting of changes in either labor taxes or in unemployment benefits to labors costs is larger the higher are those institutional variables. The paper also considers the effects of those institutions on the choice of labor taxes and of unemployment benefits by governments concerned with the costs of inflation and unemployment, as well as with redistribution to particular constituencies. A main result is that, normally, higher levels of centralization and conservativeness induce government to set higher labor taxes. JEL Classification: E5 · E6 · H2 · J3 · J5 · L1     

日本构建“地域综合照护体系”政策理念的提出及其制度化

在财政恶化、少子老龄化、家庭看护功能弱化及雇佣的非正式化背景下,为建设能够提供高质高效服务的社会养老保障体制,基于连续性照护为目标的社区居家服务的照护理念,日本政府提出了以构建"地域综合照护体系"为政策理念的社会养老保障制度改革。通过对社会保障制度相关法律的改革,使构筑"地域综合照护体系"政策理念得以制度化。目前,各地方政府及公共团体在日本厚生劳动省的推动下依据《护理保险法》及本地特点,正在从充实强化护理保险服务、强化与医疗的合作、推进护理预防、确保生活支援服务、完善居住环境等方面推进"区域综合照护体系"的构筑。     

To Invest or not to Invest: A real options approach to FDIs and tax competition

Foreign investment decisions of firms are often characterized by investment irreversibility, uncertainty, and the ability to choose the optimal timing of foreign investments. We embed these characteristics into a real option theory framework to analyze international competition among countries to attract mobile investments when firms, after the investment is sunk, can shift profit to low tax countries by transfer pricing. We find that an increase in the uncertainty of profit income reduces the equilibrium tax rates, whilst lower investment costs or larger profits, counteracts the negative fiscal externality of tax competition leading to higher equilibrium tax rates. JEL Code H25     

Bringing Back the Jobs Lost to Covid-19: The Role of Fiscal Policy

Covid-19 induced job losses occurred predominantly in industries with intensive worker–client interaction as well as in pink-collar and blue-collar occupations. We study the ability of fiscal policy to stabilize employment by occupation and industry during the Covid-19 crisis. We use a multisector, multioccupation macro-economic model and investigate different fiscal-policy instruments that help the economy recover faster. We show that fiscal stimuli foster job growth for hard-hit pink-collar workers, whereas stimulating blue-collar job creation is more challenging. Only a cut in labor income taxes generates a substantial number of blue-collar jobs.