Merchant guilds,taxation and social capital

We develop a theory of the emergence of merchant guilds as an efficient mechanism to foster cooperation between merchants and rulers, building on the complementarity between merchant guilds’ ability to enforce monopoly over trade and their social capital. Unlike existing models, we focus on local merchant guilds, rather than alien guilds, accounting for the main observed features of their behavior, internal organization and relationship with rulers. Our model delivers novel predictions about the emergence, variation, functioning, and eventual decline of this highly successful historical form of network. Our theory reconciles previous explanations and the large body of historical evidence on medieval merchant guilds. In doing so, we also shed novel light on the role of the guilds’ social capital, and its importance for taxation, welfare, and the development of towns and their government in medieval Europe.     

The buffet syndrome, midday menu and terry towels

In a recent article, Bazin et al. (Bazin, D., Ballet, J., Touahri, D., 2004. Environmental responsibility versus taxation. Ecological Economics 49 (2), 129–134.) argue that taxation produces a crowding out effect on responsible behaviours. This crowding out effect is linked to the buffet syndrome, e.g. wherein an environmental tax is like a food buffet in that when you pay you could consume as much as you want. This article means to offer a perspective on this syndrome. It shows that this syndrome comes into play only in certain circumstances and that explicit policies may avoid it. In particular, the development of clean goods and technologies may avoid the buffet syndrome.     

Social responsibility promotes conservative risk behavior

Previous studies show that group risk taking can be more conservative than individual risk taking. Two common, but untested reasons for this greater caution are the influence of social responsibility and a tendency to conform to the preferences of others. We study changes in risk taking in simple settings, where another’s risk taking can sometimes be observed, and where decisions affect not only one’s own payoffs but sometimes also affect those of a passive, second party. We find that social responsibility leads to more conservative risk behavior in group decision making. Conformism has a more symmetric effect: observing the choice of another tends to lead both individual and social decisions toward whatever the other’s expressed risk preference is. Direct tests fail to link the social behavior we observe to the social preference for distributional fairness common in decision-making under certainty.     

Regulation and taxation: A complementarity

I show how quantity regulation can lower elasticities and thereby increase optimal tax rates. Such regulation imposes regulatory incentives for particular choice quantities. Their strength varies between zero (laissez faire) and infinite (command economy). In the latter case, regulation effectively eliminates any intensive behavioral responses to taxes; a previously distortionary tax becomes a lump sum. For intermediate regulation (where some deviation is feasible), intensive behavioral responses are still weaker than under zero regulation, and so quantity regulation reduces elasticities, thereby facilitating subsequent taxation. I apply this mechanism to labor supply and present correlational evidence for this complementarity: hours worked in high-regulation countries are compressed, and these countries tax labor at higher rates.     

Income taxation of U.S. households: Facts and parametric estimates

We use micro data from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service to document how Federal Income tax liabilities vary with income, marital status and the number of dependents. We report facts on the distributions of average taxes, properties of the joint distributions of taxes paid and income, and discuss how taxes are affected by marital status and the number of children. We also provide multiple parametric estimates of tax functions for use in applied work in macroeconomics and public finance.     

A theory of capital gains taxation and business turnover

We present a theory concerning the realization of capital gains where ownership and control are linked as in Holmes and Schmitz (J. Pol. Econ. 103: 1005–1038, 1995). The model developed is a version of a Lucas-tree economy in which the productivity of a technology depends on the ownership of the technology. The existence and uniqueness of equilibrium follow from the Contraction Mapping Theorem. The theory implies that impediments to asset trading, such as capital gains taxation, negatively affect production efficiency. Moreover, we calibrate the model economy to U.S. data on small-business turnover and find that indexing deductions for inflation is capable of increasing capital-gains tax revenues. We thank an anonymous referee for helpful comments, and well as Tom Holmes, Ed Prescott, Jim Schmitz and Neil Wallace for insightful conversations. Cavalcanti is grateful for financial support from CNPq, as well as the hospitality from the University of Toronto during his visiting appointment at the Department of Economics in 2006. Erosa acknowledges the support from the Institute for Policy Analysis at the University of Toronto and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.     

Individual welfare,social deprivation and income taxation

Summary. In a homogeneous framework where individuals can only be distinguished on the basis of their incomes, we examine the incidence of taxation on the amount of deprivation felt in the society. We conceive deprivation in terms of utility or well-being rather than just in terms of income and we measure it by comparing the deprivation profiles arising in the different situations. We identify the restrictions to be imposed on the utility function which guarantee that a more progressive system of taxes always results in less social deprivation. We show that, in general, it is not possible to get an equivalence and realize a social improvement in terms of social deprivation by substituting a more progressive system of taxes for a less progressive one. Received: September 20, 1999; revised version: March 6, 2002 RID="*" ID="*" This paper forms part of the research programme of the TMR network Living Standards, Inequality and Taxation [Contract No. ERBFMRXCT 980248] of the European Communities whose financial support is gratefully acknowledged. Chakravarty wishes to express his sincere gratitude to the French Ministry of Education for financing his stay at DELTA during which this paper was written. The authors would like to thank Stephen Bazen, Nicolas Gravel and an anonymous referee, whose comments have helped to improve the paper, but they retain sole responsibility for remaining deficiencies. Correspondence to: P. Moyes     

A research of green taxation policy for promoting energy saving and emission reduction

It＇s been proved by theory and practice that taxation policy is one of the important means of realizing energy saving and emission reduction. The green taxation system in the Western countries has got better effects in energy saving and environmental protection. In the recent years, China has in succession released some taxation policies promoting energy saving and emission reduction, but still has a huge gap to meet the real needs of energy saving and emission reduction. By analyzing China＇s status quo of the polices of energy saving and emission reduction and drawing upon experiences of the developed countries about green taxation, this paper presents how to perfect ideas of China＇s energy saving and emission reduction taxation policies： adjusting taxes relevant to green taxation in the current taxation system, such as resource tax, consumer tax, and so on; collecting new environmental tax; perfecting the preferential taxation policies for the energy saving and environmental protection industries.     

Law, state power, and taxation in Islamic history

The ruler's power varied greatly in Islamic history over time and space. We explain these variations through a political economy approach to public finance, identifying factors affecting economic power and its constraints. An influential interest group capable of affecting the ruler's power was the legal community (‘ulamā’). This community could increase the ruler's ability to extract a surplus from the citizenry by conferring legitimacy, thereby lowering the cost of collecting taxes. It could also limit power through legal constraints on taxation. We show how changes in legitimacy and legal constraints affected the economic power of rulers in representative episodes of Islamic history and identify general trends and dynamic processes underlying the relationship between the state and the legal community.     

正确认识利益相关论者的企业产权和社会责任观

"利益相关者"理论描述了企业同其他社会主体的联系,却没有看清各种不同关系的实质,以它作为诉求企业所有权的根据,混淆了不同的产权主体和产权客体,颠倒了所有权与契约关系的地位和作用,分不清不同经济关系的处理原则,在产权理论上产生一系列错误.另一方面,它指出企业不可能离开社会的支持,必须处理好同其他社会主体,特别是企业职工的关系,为改善企业的经营管理,树立企业的社会责任感,构建正常的市场关系,作出有益的启示.但是,社会主义公有制内部的利益关系已经大大超越了在资本主义土壤产生的"利益相关者"理论所涉及的内容.只有它才是构建社会主义和谐社会的可靠基础.以社会主义关系及其形成的思维去论证"利益相关者"理论,或者以这种理论去解释和处理社会主义公有制的内部关系,都是不可取的.     

中国企业社会责任影响因素实证研究

本文对企业社会责任水平与影响社会责任水平的内外部因素,包括企业规模、经营年限、创新能力、出口强度、管理能力、财务绩效、产品竞争水平、政府干预、法制环境等因素间的关系进行了统计分析,结果发现,出口行为、创新能力、管理能力、财务状况等因素对提升企业的社会责任水平有显著影响.     

财产税、税源替代与耕地保护

我国在土地利用上实施土地利用管理制度,耕地保护存在着保护不力的制度性根源,地方政府既是耕地保护的实施者,又是农地非农化的驱动者.在农地非农化的利益扭曲中,地方政府是土地增值收益的主要捕获者,其中,不彻底的财税体制改革所造成的地方政府的财政困境,是地方政府农地非农化的重要诱因.所以,消除地方政府对农地非农化的驱动,积极保护耕地,必须为地方政府寻求财源替代.本文认为,财产税的全面实施为这一同题的解决提供了制度性的思路.     

Labor taxation, public finance, and wage determination: evidence from OECD countries

This paper analyzes the relationship between unemployment, average effective labour tax rates and public spending in 17 OECD countries. The focus is on the degree of centralization and cooperation in wage setting. Estimation results from a dynamic time-series-cross-section model suggest that the countries where wage setting takes place at the firm level have used labour taxes less extensively in financing welfare spending, compared to countries with centralized or decentralized bargaining. This is consistent with another finding, according to which labour taxes distort the labour demand the least in the countries with firm level bargaining.     

Shared producer and consumer responsibility — Theory and practice

Over the past decade, an increasing number of authors have been examining the nexus of producer versus consumer responsibility, often dealing with the question of how to assign responsibility for internationally traded greenhouse gas emissions. Recently, a similar problem has appeared in drafting the standards for the Ecological Footprint: While the method traditionally assumes a full life-cycle perspective with full consumer responsibility, a large number of producers (businesses and industry sectors) have started to calculate their own footprints (see www.isa.org.usyd.edu.au). Adding any producer's footprint to other producers' footprints, or to population footprints, which all already cover the full upstream supply chain of their operating inputs, leads to double-counting: The sum of footprints of producers and consumers is larger than the total national footprint. The committee in charge of the Footprint standardisation process was hence faced with the decades-old non-additivity problem, posing the following dilemma for the accounting of footprints, or any other production factor: if one disallows double-counting, but wishes to be able to account for producers and consumers, then one cannot impose the requirement of full life-cycle coverage; the supply chains of actors have to be curtailed somehow in order to avoid double-counting. This work demonstrates and discusses a non-arbitrary method of consistently delineating these supply chains, into mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive portions of responsibility to be shared by all actors in an economy.     

Assessing whether corporate social responsibility influence corporate value

This study used the corporate social responsibility (CSR) index to gauge the corporate value and social responsibility performance of corporations in Taiwan. We investigated whether CSR influences corporate value and whether the extent of that influence varies with corporate value or time. The results indicate that the influence of CSR on corporate value does not change with time. CSR exerts a positive influence on company value, and this influence does not change over time. However, the extent of the influence significantly varies with corporate value. When the corporate value of a company is not high, investing in CSR would only increase costs and fail to effectively increase corporate value. In contrast, if the corporate value of the company is high, investments in CSR in this circumstance would instead promote the effective increase of corporate value.     

论“三层次”税收公平观与中国税收公平机制重塑

传统税收公平观存在明显的局限性,主要表现为考察的视野不开阔和涵盖的内容不丰富.所以,对税收公平的理解和判断,必须延伸到经济的、社会的角度,应当建立起包含税收的负担公平、税收的经济公平和税收的社会公平三个层次的广义的税收公平观,这样才能真正把握税收公平的全部内涵.根据这一思路,对中国现行税制的公平性进行了全面考量,发现存在诸多有悖于税收公平的因素,并提出了重塑中国税收公平机制的具体构想.     

Redistributive taxation and the household: the case of individual filings

In this paper I look at the tax treatment of households under individual filings and characterise the efficiency properties of an income tax schedule that redistributes from rich to poor households. Because tax liabilities are determined on individual incomes but the decision to earn those incomes is made at the household level, tax liable members of the same household can side trade leisure for net income with one another, and such side trade enables them to carry out tax arbitrage. I analyse the problem for a two-class economy both with and without perfect assortative mating. The main conclusion is that the prevention of tax arbitrage imposes structure on the graduation of the tax schedule.     

国际税收竞争理论与实践对我国的启示

在我国日益融入全球经济的背景下，国际税收竞争理论与实践对我国税制建设具有一定的借鉴意义。应辩证认识国际税收竞争，立足国情，积极参与适度国际税收竞争，促进国家之间的税收协调，尽量避免恶性税收竞争；进一步完善税收立法、执法和司法体制，重新审视税收主权与协调。     

生态文明建设中企业实施绿色责任的现实意义和路径

将绿色责任理念融入企业的管理实践中,既是是建设生态文明的时代要求,也是企业自身长远发展的制胜法宝;既有助于人类与生态环境之间建立和谐的关系,也利于降低社会成本,提高社会资源配置效率。当前,企业实施绿色责任的路径主要是：企业应树立绿色责任意识;建立健全绿色责任管理;推动绿色责任文化建设;营造绿色责任品牌;建立绿色责任形象。     

The crowding-out effect of formal insurance on informal risk sharing: An experimental study

This paper investigates the crowding-out effect of formal insurance on informal risk-sharing arrangements via theory and laboratory experiment. Our model and simulation predict that the crowding out of private transfers is often more than one-for-one and will reduce the total risk coverage. Furthermore, the existence of a moderate degree of altruism exaggerates the crowding-out effect, especially when there is an ex-ante income inequality. These predictions are mostly supported by the laboratory experiment, except that the crowding-out effect is not more than one-for-one, and hence the total risk coverage is not significantly reduced by formal insurance.