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1.
BRUCE BRADBURY 《Fiscal Studies》2004,25(3):305-324
This paper reviews the normative welfare economic literature on income‐based targeting and contrasts its assumptions with those underlying current policy discourse. One current policy debate concerns the potential role for Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) income tests. In general, economic models within the standard (for economists) ‘welfarist’ approach provide little support for such policies. However, much policy discourse is explicitly non‐welfarist, placing a negative social value on the leisure or home production of the poor. From this perspective, EITC or workfare‐type programmes may be socially optimal. The normative foundations of this policy discourse, however, have yet to be subject to the rigorous analysis that underlies the welfarist approach. 相似文献
2.
Malte Dold 《Fiscal Studies》2023,44(2):137-150
This article summarises the theoretical foundations, main approaches and current trends in the field of behavioural normative economics. It identifies bounded rationality and bounded willpower as the two core concepts that have motivated the field. Since the concepts allow for individual preferences to be context-dependent and time-inconsistent, they pose an intricate problem for standard welfare analysis. The article discusses the ways in which two prominent approaches – the preference purification approach and the opportunity approach – have tackled the problem. It argues that shortcomings in each of these approaches motivate an agency-centric perspective. The article presents two concrete policy proposals of the agency-centric approach. While this approach is promising, the article argues for pluralism in normative economics since an exclusive focus on agency can likely not do justice to the multifarious concerns that citizens hold. 相似文献
3.
Diane Coyle Mark Fabian Eric Beinhocker Tim Besley Margaret Stevens 《Fiscal Studies》2023,44(2):109-121
The contributions of economists have long included both positive explanations of how economic systems work and normative recommendations for how they could and should work better. In recent decades, economics has taken a strong empirical turn as well as having a greater appreciation of the importance of the complexities of real-world human behaviour, institutions, the strengths and failures of markets, and interlinkages with other systems, including politics, technology, culture and the environment. This shift has also brought greater relevance and pragmatism to normative economics. While this shift towards evidence and pragmatism has been welcome, it does not in itself answer the core question of what exactly constitutes ‘better’, and for whom, and how to manage inevitable conflicts and trade-offs in society. These have long been the core concerns of welfare economics. Yet, in the 1980s and 1990s, debates on welfare economics seemed to have become marginalised. The articles in this Fiscal Studies symposium engage with the question of how to revive normative questions as a central issue in economic scholarship. 相似文献
4.
Young Jun Chun 《International Tax and Public Finance》2001,8(4):433-454
This paper examines heterogeneous effects of uncertainty of the U.S. tax policies across income classes. We construct a multi-class general equilibrium stochastic OLG model with a stochastic process of effective tax rates. In accordance with empirical evidence, the model includes two types of families: a high-income family, whose members have bequest motives and share risks; and a low-income family, whose members do not. Some notable results are as follows: (i) under a CRRA preference the efficient allocation of resources within family generates the same proportional standard deviation of consumption and leisure among family members; (ii) the welfare cost of the uncertainty of a tax policy is higher for the low-income family than for the high-income family: the cost for the low-lifetime-income family is about 145% of that for the high-lifetime-income family; Finally, (iii) the absolute level of the welfare cost for the whole population is shown to be about 0.53% of GNP, which is higher than the welfare cost measures by previous research such as Bizer and Judd (1989) and Skinner (1988). 相似文献
5.
Blomquist and Christensen [(2005). The role of prices for excludable public goods, International Tax and Public Finance, 12 ,61–79] argue that welfare is initially decreasing in the price of an excludable public good and that the case for a positive
price for an excludable public good price is weak. We argue that this result follows from their particular characterization
of the public good and that an alternative and equally reasonable characterization overturns their result. Hence, the policy
case for a positive price on the public good is stronger than Blomquist and Christiansen suggest.
JEL Classification H21 · H41 相似文献
6.
Taxation, Migration, and Pollution 总被引:1,自引:1,他引:0
This paper analyzes optimal fiscal, environmental and immigration policy for a single jurisdiction. In the presence of immigration
quotas, taxes on the output of externality-producing industries should be higher than indicated by the standard rule for Pigovian
corrective taxation. Immigration quotas are not optimal if fiscal instruments can be used to control immigration, and relaxation
of immigration quotas generally increases domestic welfare. If optimal taxes are imposed on immigrants, no immigration quota
should be imposed, and a version of the traditional Pigovian rule characterizes optimal taxation of domestic externalities.
If production in the immigrants' country of origin causes trans-boundary spillovers, domestic welfare can be improved by lighter
taxation of immigrants or by further relaxation of immigration quotas.
This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date. 相似文献
7.
Sijbren Cnossen 《International Tax and Public Finance》2007,14(6):699-732
This article surveys alcohol consumption, taxation and regulation in the European Union (EU). It uses the estimates of cost-of-illness
studies to gauge the external costs of harmful alcohol use. In all but one member state, the costs exceed alcohol excise duty
collections. An optimal alcohol excise is difficult to design, because the welfare gains from a reduction in socially costly
heavy drinking must be balanced against the welfare loss from a fall in moderate drinking. This suggests that while an alcohol
excise increase may be efficiency improving, complementary regulatory measures, which focus on specific problem groups, should
be an important element of the policy package. A case can also be made for reducing wasteful cross-border shopping by raising
the minimum duties on wine, beer and spirits, preferably in line with their relative alcohol content.
相似文献
8.
International travellers are frequently offered the opportunity to purchase a certain quantity of goods duty-free. Individuals
differ in their opportunities to benefit from duty-free shopping, and we focus on the implications of these differences for
optimal commodity taxation within a version of the optimal tax model of Mirrlees (Review of Economic Studies, 38, 175–208,
1971). We show how duty-free alters the constraints on the use of commodity taxes to reduce the distortionary costs of income
taxation or to reflect externalities. Beyond characterising optimal taxes in the duty-free regime, we discuss conditions under
which allowing duty-free would increase or reduce social welfare.
相似文献
9.
Bjarne Astrup Jensen 《Annals of Finance》2009,5(1):91-123
We establish necessary and sufficient conditions for a linear taxation system to be neutral—within the multi-period discrete
time “no arbitrage” model—in the sense that valuation is invariant to the exact sequence of tax rates, realization dates as
well as immune to timing options attempting to twist the time profile of taxable income through wash sale transactions.
“In the study of investments, taxes are largely a source of embarrassment to financial economists.” (Introduction to Dybvig and Ross 1986) “Accordingly, my approach in this chapter is to examine the restrictions on the income measurement rules applicable to financial instruments implied by the requirement that the rules be linear. . . . Linearity is a desideratum of a tidy tax system.” (Bradford 2000, p. 373–374)相似文献
10.
Non-performance lies at the heart of much of the regulation that insurance companies face. Consumers’ concerns about non-performance of the insurance provider have also been cited as a possible explanation for low demand of microinsurance. We provide a behavioral evaluation of the welfare effects of non-performance risk. We test the hypothesis that the presence of non-performance risk negatively impacts not just take-up of insurance but more importantly the welfare of the insured. We also test if violations of the reduction of compound lotteries axiom could drive this decrease in take-up and welfare. The results show that the compound risk characteristic of non-performance risk does not significantly decrease the welfare of insurance choices made by individuals. This counter-intuitive result is sensitive to the structural modeling of risk preferences. If one assumes the reduction of compound lotteries axiom does characterize behavior towards risk, one finds evidence that non-performance risk reduces welfare for the insured. But if one correctly allows for violations in that axiom in the representation of risk preferences, which is appropriate if one is going to test for the effect of compound risk from non-performance, then the counter-intuitive result is obtained. Take-up is not a reliable proxy for welfare, and the behavioral drivers of take-up are again not the same drivers of welfare. These results provide structural behavioral insight to inform normative policy design with respect to insurance regulation. 相似文献
11.
Muhammad Q. Islam 《International Tax and Public Finance》1998,5(4):489-498
The welfare cost of capital income taxation is analyzed utilizing intertemporally dependent preference operationalized using a variable rate of time preference. It is shown that if households exhibit increasing marginal impatience, then the welfare cost of capital income taxation is inversely related to the elasticity of the rate of time preference with respect to consumption. Therefore, the welfare cost of capital income taxation reported using time additive preferences may not be robust. Numerical examples show that the use of time additive preferences could result in the welfare cost of capital income taxation to be overestimated by as much as 25%. 相似文献
12.
13.
Philippe Thalmann Lawrence H. Goulder François Delorme 《International Tax and Public Finance》1996,3(4):449-478
Changes in capital taxes by one economy spill onto other economies with internationally mobile capital. We evaluate these impacts using a two-region, intertemporal general equilibrium model. The foreign economy's unilateral reduction in corporate income taxation has positive but small effects on U.S. welfare. In contrast, unilateral reductions in personal income taxation impose large negative spillovers. The differences result from CIT being source-based and PIT residence-based. The CIT cut reduces tax burdens to U.S. residents who invest abroad, while the PIT cut reduces foreigners' tax burdens only. Through general equilibrium adjustments neglected in simpler models, the PIT cut lowers U.S. residents' welfare. 相似文献
14.
We develop a theory of social planning with a concern for economic coercion, which we define as the difference between consumers’ actual utility and the “counterfactual” utility they expect to obtain if they were able to set policy themselves. Reasons to limit economic coercion include protecting minorities and preventing disenfranchised groups from engaging in socially costly behavior, or political economy considerations. If consumers are fully rational, we show that limiting coercion is equivalent to placing more welfare weight on coerced consumers at the expense of others. If, however, consumers’ rationality is bounded, counterfactual utility becomes endogenous to current policy, and the welfare loss associated with limiting coercion increases. We set up a numerical version of our model and find that the bias-related welfare loss can be substantial. 相似文献
15.
Radim Bohacek 《Journal of Monetary Economics》2008,55(1):1-16
We analyze optimal income taxes and optimal schooling subsidies in a dynamic private information economy with observable human capital accumulation. We show that under plausible conditions the marginal schooling subsidies are positive and that they are zero at both endpoints of the skill distribution.We compute the optimal policies and evaluate their impact over the transition and at the steady state. We find that the optimal schooling policies are significantly smaller than the optimal marginal income taxes. If optimal schooling policies are introduced jointly with optimal income taxes then their welfare and aggregate effects are small. However, if income taxes are not set optimally then the optimal schooling policies have significant welfare and aggregate effects. 相似文献
16.
Yukihiro Nishimura 《International Tax and Public Finance》2009,16(2):176-197
This paper extends the analysis of optimal income taxation under uncertainty studied by Cremer and Pestieau (International Tax and Public Finance, 3, 281–295, 1996). We introduce asymmetric information in the insurance market whereby private insurance companies cannot identify the risk
probability of the agents, and we examine its effect on public policy. We consider the separating equilibrium of Rothschild
and Stiglitz (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 90, 629–649, 1976) and Riley (Econometrica, 47, 331–359, 1979) where the low risk agent is only partially insured. The presence of the distortion in the insurance market changes the affinity
of labor, and in some cases, we show that the scope of redistribution and the resulting social welfare are higher under asymmetric
information than under full information. We also show that the increase in social insurance affects the utility and labor
incentive of the low risk type by relaxing the self-selection constraint in the insurance market. The policy implications
of the redistributive taxation and social insurance are analytically and numerically examined.
相似文献
17.
As recently argued by Diamond (1998), one of the key factors explaining the progressivity of an optimal non-linear income tax is the distribution of productivity among workers. Migration is one source of changes in the productivity distribution. How changes in the populations ability distribution affect optimal income tax schedules has received little attention. Changing the distribution generally affects both the objective function and the government budget constraint. We first consider the comparative statics of the fraction of highly-skilled workers with maximin and maximax welfare functions (so that only the second effect is present) and a quasi-linear utility function. We also present some results for a utilitarian social welfare function.We then study the interaction between mobility and redistributive taxation. We consider mobility by either the skilled or unskilled population under majority voting where governments take the population as fixed. If individuals choose to relocate independently, having identical ability distributions is always a stable equilibrium when the unskilled are the mobile group. However, this is not always the case when the skilled are mobile. If groups of individuals can choose where to locate, having identical ability distributions across regions is only an equilibrium when the mobile type has an overall majority. 相似文献
18.
A. B. Atkinson 《International Tax and Public Finance》2008,15(1):5-17
This article is concerned both with the substantive policy issue of the implications of the European welfare state in a global
setting and with the way in which economists analyse the welfare state. Economics has made a major contribution to our understanding
of the welfare state through the provision of formal models. These have allowed us to see the implications of social protection
for countries increasingly open to international competition. These models, however, leave out essential elements, and the
standard Heckscher–Ohlin 2-good, 2-factor, 2-country assumptions impose too tight a straitjacket. We do not observe full factor
price equalisation. The paper considers how we might relax this straitjacket to incorporate elements that are important in
the public debate, while preserving tractability. The resulting 3×3×3 model is used to investigate the impact of globalisation
on the welfare state, contrasting Europe and the US.
The first version of this paper was written while I was visiting the Economic Research Department of the Bank of Italy. I
am most grateful to the Research Department for their hospitality, but make clear that the contents of the paper are solely
my responsibility. The paper was presented at the April 2006 Netspar Conference in the Hague. I thank the discussants, André
de Jong and Cees Oudshoorn, and the conference participants, for their helpful comments. The revision has benefited from the
valuable suggestions of the referees and editors, and the final version has been greatly improved as a result of a conversation
with Peter Neary. None of the above are to be held responsible for the remaining shortcomings of the paper. 相似文献
19.
Thomas Dickescheid 《International Tax and Public Finance》2004,11(6):721-739
This paper examines the choice of international double taxation relief methods by two small countries that mutually exchange foreign direct investment. At the first stage, each country chooses between the exemption and the credit method (as prescribed by the OECD model treaty) and at the second stage, each country sets nationally optimal non-discriminatory capital tax rates. It is shown that in the subgame perfect equilibrium both countries choose the exemption method. Mutual application of the exemption method is also shown to yield the highest welfare for each country. While the tax export effect generally induces both countries to choose inefficiently high tax rates, this effect is weakest when both countries exempt foreign earned profits from domestic taxation. 相似文献
20.
Most work on taxation assumes that market adjustments to taxation will be small and continuous and so analyzes the effects of taxation using standard marginal methods. However, the world often changes in large and discontinuous ways. This paper looks at the effects of taxation when discontinuities in market adjustments are allowed because market structure is determined endogenously by the discrete entry and exit decisions of firms. The results indicate that the potential for discontinuities generates tax effects that are considerably different from those that emerge when adjustments are small and continuous. With discontinuities, taxes can have large and discrete effects, for example, by increasing prices far in excess of the tax itself or by changing utility in a highly nonmarginal way. Of more significance, with discontinuities taxes can actually increase welfare even when they lessen competition and raise prices. Taxes can also have markedly different effects on the income and welfare of different groups. Consumers are always made worse off by a tax, but a tax may be supported by the firms in an industry if the tax limits entry and thereby increases firm profits. 相似文献