ASSESSING THE WELFARE IMPACT OF TAX REFORM: A CASE STUDY OF THE 2001 U.S. TAX CUT

This paper implements a relatively simple methodological approach to estimate the impact on family welfare of a specific tax reform. The measured impact can differ greatly from simple marginal tax rate comparisons, and conclusions about the distribution of the welfare impact can vary depending on the basis of comparison. For example, absolute welfare gains from the 2001 U.S. tax reform were concentrated among the highest and lowest income families, whereas welfare gains measured as a share of pre‐tax income are found to be nearly monotonically declining in income.     

Replacing the U.S. income tax with a progressive consumption tax: A sequenced general equilibrium approach

This paper examines the welfare consequences of changing the current U.S. income tax system to a progressive consumption tax. We compute a sequence of single period equilibria in which savings decisions depend on the expected future return to capital. In the presence of existing income taxes, the U.S. economy is assumed to lie on a balanced growth path. With the change to a consumption tax, individuals save more and initially consume less. As the capital stock grows, consumption eventually overtakes that of the original path, and the economy approaches the new balanced growth path with higher consumption and a greater capital stock. Both the transition and the balanced growth paths enter our welfare evaluations. We find the discounted present value of the stream of net gains is approximately $650 billion in 1973 dollars, just over 1 percent of the discounted present value of national income. Larger gains occur if further reform of capital income taxation accompanies the change. We examine the sensitivity of the results, both to the design of the consumption tax and to the values of elasticity and other parameters. The paper also contains estimates of the time required to adjust from one growth path to the other.     

On the Evaluation of Economic Mobility

This paper presents a framework for the evaluation and measurement of "reversal" and "origin independence" as separate aspects of economic mobility. We show that evaluation depends on aversion to multi-period inequality, aversion to inter-temporal fluctuations, and aversion to future risk. We construct "extended Atkinson indices" that allow us to quantify the relative impact of reversal and origin independence on welfare. We apply our approach to the comparison of income mobility in Germany and in the U.S.. When aversion to inequality is the only consideration, the U.S. gains more from mobility than Germany. This reflects similar gains from reversal in the two countries but greater gains in the U.S. from origin independence. The introduction of aversion to intertemporal fluctuations and aversion to future risk makes the impact of mobility in the two countries more similar.     

How deep is your love? A quantitative spatial analysis of the transatlantic trade partnership

This paper explores the quantitative effects of trade liberalization envisioned in a transatlantic trade and investment partnership (TTIP) between the United States and the European Union. We use a quantitative trade model that, in contrast to other works, features consumptive and productive uses of land and we allow for labor mobility and a spatial equilibrium. Our calibration draws mainly on the world input–output database (WIOD). The eventual outcome of the negotiations is uncertain. Tariffs in E.U.–U.S. trade are already very low, however, so that an agreement will have a major impact only by eliminating nontariff barriers. These are extremely hard to quantify. We address these uncertainties by considering a corridor of trade‐liberalization paths and by providing numerous robustness checks. Even with ambitious liberalization, real income gains within a TTIP are in the range of up to 0.46 percent for most countries. The effect on outside countries is typically negative, yet even smaller. Taking land into account scales down the welfare effects strongly. Interestingly, we find that all German counties derive unambiguous welfare gains even though the model allows for negative terms‐of‐trade effects. Our analysis also implies that in order to arrive at the same welfare gains as under a TTIP, a multilateral liberalization would have to be much more ambitious for the U.S. than for the E.U.     

SOCIAL INSURANCE AND OCCUPATIONAL MOBILITY

This article studies how insurance from progressive taxation improves the matching of workers to occupations. We propose an equilibrium dynamic assignment model to illustrate how social insurance encourages mobility. Workers experiment to find their best occupational fit in a process filled with uncertainty. Risk aversion and limited earnings insurance induce workers to remain in unfitting occupations. We estimate the model using microdata from the United States and Germany. Higher earnings uncertainty explains the U.S. higher mobility rate. When workers in the United States enjoy Germany's higher progressivity, mobility rises. Output and welfare gains are large.     

Welfare costs of reclassification risk in the health insurance market

We assess the quantitative importance of reclassification risk in the US health insurance market. Reclassification risk arises because the health conditions of individuals evolve over time, while a typical health insurance contract only lasts for one year. Thus, a change in the health status can lead to a significant change in the health insurance premium. We measure welfare gains from introducing explicit insurance against this risk in the form of guaranteed renewable health insurance contracts. We find that in the current institutional environment individuals are well-sheltered against reclassification risk and they only moderately gain from having access to these contracts. More specifically, we show that employer-sponsored health insurance and public means-tested transfers play an important role in providing implicit insurance against reclassification risk. If these institutions are removed, the average welfare gains from having access to guaranteed renewable contracts exceed 4% of the annual consumption.     

ON THE DISTRIBUTIONAL CONSEQUENCES OF CHILD LABOR LEGISLATION*

This article studies the effects of child labor legislation on human capital accumulation and the distribution of wealth and welfare. We calibrate our model to U.S. data circa 1880 and find that the consequences of restricting child labor or providing tax‐financed education depend on the main source of individual household income. Households with significant financial assets unambiguously lose from government intervention, whereas high‐wage workers benefit most from a child labor ban, and low‐wage workers benefit most from free education. Introducing free education results in substantial welfare gains, whereas a child labor ban induces small welfare losses.     

Health insurance and the labor supply decisions of older workers: Evidence from a U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs expansion

This paper exploits a major mid-1990s expansion in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs health care system to provide evidence on the labor market effects of expanding health insurance availability. Using data from the Current Population Survey, we employ a difference-in-differences strategy to compare the labor market behavior of older veterans and non-veterans before and after the VA health benefits expansion to test the impact of public health insurance on labor supply. We find that older workers are significantly more likely to decrease work both on the extensive and intensive margins after receiving access to non-employer based insurance. Workers with some college education or a college degree are more likely to transition into self-employment, a result consistent with “job-lock” effects. However, less-educated workers are more likely to leave self-employment, a result suggesting that the positive income effect from receiving public insurance dominates the “job-lock” effect for these workers. Some relatively disadvantaged sub-populations may also increase their labor supply after gaining greater access to public insurance, consistent with complementary positive health effects of health care access or decreased work disincentives for these groups. We conclude that this reform has affected employment and retirement decisions, and suggest that future moves toward universal coverage or expansions of Medicare are likely to have significant labor market effects.     

Anti-insurance: Analysing the Health Insurance System in Australia

This paper develops a model to analyse the Australian health insurance system when individuals differ in their health risk and this risk is private information. In Australia private insurance both duplicates and supplements public insurance. We show that, absent any other interventions, this results in implicit transfers of wealth from those most at risk of adverse health to those least at risk. At the social level, these transfers represent a mean preserving spread of income, creating social risk and lowering welfare – what we call anti-insurance. The recently introduced rebate on private health insurance can improve welfare by alleviating anti-insurance.     

Welfare and Macroeconomic Effects of the German Pension Acts of 1992 and 1999: A Dynamic CGE Study

The German Pension Act of 1992 raises the mandatory retirement age while the Act of 1999 adjusts pension benefits to demographic changes. To examine welfare and macroeconomic effects of these reform schemes, we have carried out a dynamic CGE study. The model used is an enlarged version of the Auerbach–Kotlikoff model with endogenous retirement decisions, unemployment, age-dependent rates of unemployment, health, and long-term care insurance. The simulation is performed in two stages: first, the effects of the population decline in Germany are computed ignoring the reforms and, second, the effects of the reform schemes are examined and compared with the benchmark case. The results suggest that the Act of 1992 implies welfare gains while suspending the Act of 1999 induces welfare losses.     

Do Consumers Purchase Too Much Health Insurance? The Role of Market Power in Health‐Care Markets

Several authors have suggested that consumers purchase too much health insurance in private markets. We readdress this issue within a model that combines excess health‐care demand due to health insurance with market power due to monopolistic production of health‐care services. We evaluate the market equilibrium in terms of consumer welfare and social welfare. The consumer welfare criterion suggests that in the market equilibrium consumers in fact purchase too much health insurance coverage. The social welfare criterion, in contrast, suggests that because profits of the health‐care industry are properly accounted for, consumers should purchase more insurance coverage than they choose to do in the market equilibrium.     

The extension of social security coverage in developing countries

We study the dynamic general equilibrium effects of introducing a social pension program to elderly informal sector workers in developing countries who lack formal risk sharing mechanisms against income and longevity risks. To this end, we formulate a stochastic dynamic general equilibrium model that incorporates defining features of developing countries: a large informal sector, private transfers as an informal safety net, and a non-universal social security system. We find that the extension of retirement benefits to informal sector workers results in efficiency losses due to adverse effects on capital accumulation and the allocation of resources across formal and informal sectors. Despite these losses recipients of social pensions experience welfare gains as the positive insurance effects attributed to the extension of a social insurance system dominate. The welfare gains crucially depend on the skill distribution, private intra-family transfers and the specific tax used to finance the expansion.     

Measuring the Impacts of Global Trade Reform with Optimal Aggregators of Distortions

Aggregation of trade distortion measures is essential in applied work, but traditional trade‐weighted average measures are egregiously flawed. This paper shows how appropriate tariff aggregation can overcome underestimation of both efficiency and terms‐of‐trade gains from reform. The improvement is shown to result from better measurement of a distortion effect that is most important in the early stages of reform and a weighting effect that becomes more important as protection is reduced. Applications confirm that the technique can be applied relatively easily, and—with elasticity estimates suggested by the available econometric evidence—point to close to a doubling of the global welfare gains from global trade reform, and dramatic changes in the measured welfare impacts in many individual cases. Sensitivity analysis suggests that, for global trade reform, the ease of substitution between tariff lines is much more important than that between varieties from different countries. We provide an online aggregation tool to allow replication of our analysis or investigation of alternative scenarios for global reform. We hope that this paper will contribute both to wider use of optimal aggregators and improved estimates of the key elasticity parameters.     

IDIOSYNCRATIC RISK,AGGREGATE RISK,AND THE WELFARE EFFECTS OF SOCIAL SECURITY

We ask whether a pay‐as‐you‐go financed social security system is welfare improving in an economy with idiosyncratic and aggregate risk. We show that the whole welfare benefit from insurance against both risks is greater than the sum of benefits from insurance against the isolated risks. One reason is the convexity of the welfare gain. The other reason is a direct risk interaction amplifying the utility losses from risk. Our quantitative evaluation shows that introducing a minimum pension leads to sizeable welfare gains, despite substantial crowding out. About 60% of these gains would be missing from summing up the isolated benefits.     

Public debt and welfare in a quantitative Schumpeterian growth model with incomplete markets

This paper quantifies the welfare effects of counterfactual public debt policies using an endogenous growth model with incomplete markets. The economy features public debt, Schumpeterian growth, infinitely-lived agents, uninsurable income risk, and discount factor heterogeneity. Two versions of the model are specified, one with households holding equity in the group of innovating firms. The model is calibrated to the U.S. economy to match the degree of wealth inequality, the share of R&D expenditure in GDP, the firms’ exit rate, the average growth rate, and other standard long-run targets. When comparing balanced growth paths, I find large welfare gains in equilibria characterized by governments accumulating public wealth. The result is robust to the mechanism used to generate a highly concentrated wealth (i.e., preference heterogeneity or “superstar” income shocks). Welfare effects decompositions show that level effects and growth effects reinforce each other. The responses of both the intermediate goods and their market conditions are key in explaining the large level effects. The version of the model without equity is computationally easier to solve, allowing to consider transitional dynamics. Taking into account the dynamic adjustment to the new long-run equilibrium, I show that the transitional welfare costs are not large enough to change the sign of the welfare effects stemming from a change in public debt. I find that eliminating public debt would lead to a 0.8% increase in welfare, while moving to a debt/GDP ratio of 100% would entail a welfare loss of 0.5%. A decomposition analysis shows that growth accounts for approximately 50% of the overall welfare effects.     

MEASURING THE IMPACT OF VALUING HEALTH INSURANCE ON LEVELS AND TRENDS IN INEQUALITY AND HOW THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT OF 2010 COULD AFFECT THEM

A substantial part of the U.S. inequality literature focuses on yearly levels and trends in pre‐tax, post‐transfer cash income and its distribution over time and finds that median income appears to be stagnating, with income growth primarily coming at higher income levels. When we use data from the Current Population Survey for 1995–2008 and add the value of employer‐ and government‐provided health insurance coverage, not only does it increase the upward trend in the level of resources controlled by Americans, but also reduces the level of inequality in these resources and its upward trend. We then provide a highly stylized example of this broader income measure's value in capturing the impact of two key provisions of the Affordable Care Act of 2010—an expansion in Medicaid and the provision of subsidies to lower‐income families for purchasing private coverage on state‐run exchanges. Even though these incremental expansions build on existing systems of government‐provided health insurance, we find that the vast majority of the benefits would still accrue to the bottom three deciles of the income distribution when we include the value of employer‐ and government‐provided health insurance in our expanded yearly income measure. (JEL D31, H51, I14)     

A Simple Model of Health Insurance Competition

This study investigates competition between health insurance companies under different financing regulations. We consider two alternatives advanced in recent German healthcare reform discussions: competition by contribution rates (health contributions) and by fees (health premia). We find that contribution rate competition yields lower company profits and higher consumer welfare than premia competition when switching between insurance companies is costly.     

MICROECONOMIC REFORM AND INCOME DISTRIBUTION: THE CASE OF AUSTRALIAN PORTS AND RAIL FREIGHT

We analyze structural changes in the Australian ports and rail freight industries that were driven by microeconomic reform; we find such reforms may generate welfare gains with reduced inequality. We estimate the effects on household income groups of these industry changes by applying a computable general equilibrium model incorporating microsimulation behavior. The structural changes lead to a small increase in household welfare in most regions, with an overall increase of 0.18%, and a small decrease in inequality. Our analysis suggests that policy makers in Australia and other high‐income nations should give serious consideration to microeconomic reform of infrastructure industries. (JEL C68, C69, D31, L92)     

MACROECONOMIC AND REDISTRIBUTIONAL EFFECTS OF CONSUMPTION TAXES IN THE USA*

This paper studies the effect of an increase in consumption taxes using a dynamic general equilibrium model of overlapping generations calibrated to the US economy. When the proceeds are used to reduce income taxes, the reform raises the aggregate capital and labour supply in the long run. Workers increase labour supply immediately in response to the reform, while consumption rises only gradually. The tax reform also transfers wealth from old consumers to young consumers. As a result, while future generations experience significant welfare gains, current generations, particularly old consumers, tend to experience sizable welfare losses. When the proceeds are used for a lump‐sum transfer, the aggregate capital and labour both decrease in the long run. This reform is welfare‐improving for the current low‐income households.     

Welfare improving distributionally neutral tax reforms

In a new model with incomplete markets, I quantitatively determine tax reforms that are welfare improving, distributionally neutral, and leave the budget balance unchanged in the long run. I consider a new reform. I eliminate capital income taxation and replace it with progressive consumption taxation, consisting of taxing necessities and luxuries at different rates. I compare steady states under various tax regimes. I find that progressive rather than uniform consumption taxation generates higher welfare gains in the long run and during the transition to the steady state. While this type of reform achieves redistribution neutrality only in the long run, it generates welfare gains for the whole population during the transition.