Destination taxation and evasion: Evidence from U.S. inter-state commodity flows

Tax evasion has been an important issue in the accounting literature for several decades, but the focus has been on corporate income taxes. We develop a new way to examine tax evasion that focuses on corporate transactions, rather than corporate profits. Specifically, we examine how commodity flows respond to destination sales taxes, allowing for tax evasion as a function of distance between trade partners. After accounting for transportation costs, we find that the effect of taxes decreases as distance increases. This is consistent with the notion that longer distances between trade partners hinder government oversight and increase the likelihood of successful tax evasion. Our results are robust with respect to outliers, strategic neighbor effects, information sharing agreements and other re-specifications. These results are important to policymakers because they evidence the difficulty of enforcing destination taxation in open economies such as U.S. states and the European Union.     

Government, taxes and banking crises

This paper analyzes the effectiveness of different government policies to prevent the emergence of banking crises. In particular, we study the impact on welfare of using taxpayers money to recapitalize banks, government injection of money into the banking system through credit lines, the creation of a buffer and taxes on financial transactions (the Tobin tax). We illustrate the trade-off between these policies and derive policy implications.     

间接税亲贫性与代内归宿——穷人从减税中获益了吗?

税收工具作为财政扶贫机制中的重要一环,在推进精准扶贫、精准脱贫上发挥着重要作用。本文基于CFPS2012入户调查数据和中国2012年投入产出表,运用微观模拟方法测算出家庭的间接税负,在此基础上,借鉴衡量经济“涓滴效应”的亲贫增长指数,构建了识别和测度税制“亲贫性”的数量方法,评估间接税的减税政策能否自发惠及穷人,进一步测算家庭不同年龄层的间接税负代内归宿。结果显示:间接税整体上不具有“亲贫性”,其中增值税的“亲富性”最强,减税能让穷人比富人获益更多;儿童、成人以及老人均是间接税的负税人,贫困家庭抚养小孩而承担的间接税负比重高于非贫困家庭,赡养老人而负担的间接税负比重低于非贫困家庭。据此本文认为,继续推动大规模的间接税减税政策、采取差别化的增值税和消费税减免策略、逐步形成以直接税为主的税制结构,是改变间接税"亲富性"和强化税收扶贫职能的有效措施。     

Fiscal policy with banks and financial frictions

We assess the role of banks to the transmission of optimal and exogenous changes in fiscal policy to the economy. We built-up a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with patient and impatient agents, banks and a government to find that banks and their associated capital-adequacy constraint mitigate the negative spill-over effects to the economy from higher taxes. Specifically, we confirm that labour income tax is the most distortionary fiscal instrument. The optimal choice of a housing tax is the most favorable funding source to a temporary increase in public spending. The combination of housing and labour taxes is the most preferred tax bundle to be optimally chosen under negative output shocks. Moreover, a permanent increase in housing tax is beneficial if it is welfare enhancing and the existence of banks benefits mainly impatient households under permanently higher consumption taxes. Finally, these results remain robust to various robustness checks.     

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.     

On the design of an optimal non-linear tax/pension system with habit formation

We study the optimal tax/pension design in a two-period model where individuals differ in both productivity and discount rates or projection bias and where their utility of the retirement period consumption is not independent of the earlier standard of living. We consider both welfarist and paternalistic social objectives. The paternalistic government attempts to correct the projection bias by using a higher discount factor. We derive general mathematical expressions that characterize optimal tax/pension design (marginal tax/subsidy rates). They suggest that the pattern of marginal labor income taxes depends on habit formation. Negative marginal labor income tax rates are possible. To gain a better understanding, we examine numerically the properties of an optimal lifetime redistribution policy with habit formation. We find support for non-linear tax/pension program in which some types of individuals are taxed while some are subsidized. The effect of changes in the degree of habit formation is explored in the numerical simulations as well as the implications of different degrees of correlation between skill and projection bias.     

Fiscal policy reforms and dynamic Laffer effects

This paper looks at the conditions under which a dynamic Laffer effect occurs. Using a basic model, we explain and reconcile selected findings in the literature. We numerically show that a lower tax rate on capital income is the best candidate for obtaining a dynamic Laffer effect—here defined as an improvement in the long-run budget balance of the government. Moreover, ignoring the stock of initial debt and changes in labor supply lead to an overestimation and underestimation of the effect, respectively. Finally, we show that when lower taxes on factor income are financed by higher taxes on consumption, there exists a wide array of combinations for which there is an improvement in both the long-run government budget balance and lifetime welfare. These combinations, however, differ in their implications for labor supply and immediate welfare effects.     

Political Sustainability and the Design of Environmental Taxes

This paper studies the issue of political support for environmental taxes. The environmental tax is determined by majority voting, given a refund rule that specifies the allocation of tax proceeds. The refund rule is chosen by a welfare-maximizing constitutional planner. We show that: (i) The equilibrium tax rate is increasing in the proportion of tax reductions based on wage incomes. (ii) If labor and capital income taxes are reduced in the same proportion, to keep the government's budget balanced, majority voting yields a rate of environmental taxation that is lower than the optimal (Pigouvian) level. (iii) To mitigate this negative bias, the government reduces wage taxes by a higher proportion than capital income taxes. (iv) The final outcome will either be the Pigouvian tax or else all reductions will be given in wage taxes. This depends on individuals' preferences for the polluting good as well as wage and capital income distributions.     

Tax Setting in a Federal System: The Case of Personal Income Taxation in Canada

In a decentralised tax system, the effects of tax policies enacted by one government are not confined to its own jurisdiction. First, if both the regional and the federal levels of government co-occupy the same fields of taxation, tax rate increases by one layer of government will reduce taxes collected by the other. Second, if the tax base is mobile, tax rate increases by one regional government will raise the amount of taxes collected by other regional governments. These sources of fiscal interdependence are called in the literature vertical and horizontal tax externalities, respectively. Third, as Smart (1998) shows, if equalisation transfers are present, an increase in the standard equalisation tax rate provides incentives to raise taxes to the receiving provinces. A way to check the empirical relevance of these hypotheses is to test for the existence of interactions between the regional tax rate, on the one hand, and the federal tax rate, the tax rate set by competing regions, and the standard equalisation tax rate, on the other hand. Following this approach, this paper estimates provincial tax setting functions with data on Canadian personal income taxation for the period 1982–1996. We find a significant positive response of provincial tax rates to changes in the federal income tax rate, the tax rates of competing provinces, and the standard equalisation rate (only for receiving provinces). We also find that the reaction to horizontal competition is stronger in the provinces that do not receive equalisation transfers.     

Do government preferences matter for tax competition?

This paper explores how government preferences affect capital tax decisions of a country. We develop a model in which governments, differentiating in their preferences for economic development and income equality, compete for mobile capital over corporation taxes. The key prediction of the model, borne out in data from OECD countries over the years 1990–2012, is that an increase in government preferences for pursuing economic development relative to income equality makes countries’ horizontal tax reactions stronger. Unlike the existing studies, our result contributes to the tax competition literature by highlighting the importance of government preferences in determining the extent of tax competition among countries and so offering a novel explanation for the widely observed heterogeneous tax policies across countries.     

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.     

After the death of inflation: will fiscal drag survive?

Declining inflation rates might have negative consequences for tax revenues. Phenomena such as the inflationary bracket creep in a progressive income tax system do not work any longer. With this background, the paper analyses the extent of fiscal drag for OECD countries since 1965. Some consideration of the role of money illusion and indexation in this context lays the theoretical base. A framework is presented that allows for the classification of fiscal structures with regard to the type of fiscal drag. The subsequent econometric panel analysis is performed for total and disaggregated government revenues. The results back theoretical considerations of inflation's impact on different kinds of taxes, which tends to be positive for individual income taxes and social security contributions and is negative for corporate income taxation. The paper concludes that both declining inflation and changing tax structures limit the potential for future fiscal drag.     

Endogenous Fertility and the Design of Family Taxation

The paper innovates on the existing optimal taxation literature by taking fertility as endogenous, and allowing for households to be differentiated by their ability to raise children, as well as by their ability to raise income. In a context where the government cannot observe personal abilities, fertility behaviour conveys a great deal of information about those characteristics, which helps to relax the self-selection constraints on re-distribution. Bi-dimentional household differentiation introduces the possibility that re-distribution will be from households with low utility to households with high utility, and that it may be optimal to accentuate or reverse the sign of laissez-faire utility inequality. Contrary to popular belief, we find that it is not necessarily optimal for the tax system to be so designed that an additional child would lighten the tax burden on his or her parents. If it is, the optimal policy may include an unusual mix of taxes on number of children, subsidies on child-specific commodities, income support for low-wage households, and positive marginal income tax rates for all.     

Optimal taxation and welfare benefits with monitoring of job search

In order to investigate the interaction between tax policy, welfare benefits, the government technology for monitoring and sanctioning inadequate search, workfare, and externalities from work, we incorporate endogenous job search and involuntary unemployment into a model of optimal nonlinear income taxation. In this setting, the government faces a trade-off between boosting employment of low-skilled agents and raising work effort of high-skilled workers. If sanctions for inadequate search effort can be targeted at high productivity types for whom it is socially optimal to search, the government can afford to levy higher labor taxes on marginal workers without discouraging these agents from seeking work. This allows for lower marginal taxes on work effort of agents with a job. In contrast to workfare, job externalities in the private sector raise marginal tax rates, as the government attaches more importance to boosting employment of low-skilled workers.     

Did PCAOB rules on ethics,independence, and tax services influence financial reporting for income taxes?

The PCAOB Rules on Ethics, Independence, and Tax Services prohibited accounting firms from providing aggressive tax-position transactions to their audit clients. We exploit this setting to examine whether the scrutiny of the PCAOB affects companies’ financial reporting for income tax accounts. We find robust evidence that the overall quality of the income tax accrual increased after companies significantly reduced auditor-provided tax service (APTS) fees in response to the regulation. We show that this improvement is a function of companies’ pre-regulation tax aggressiveness. In addition, we find evidence that after the fee reductions, tax-aggressive companies increased financial statement reserves for uncertain income tax positions without changing tax-aggressive decisions. Overall, our findings are consistent with an improvement in the financial reporting for income taxes under regulatory scrutiny which is more pronounced for companies that were tax aggressive in the pre-regulation period.     

The Stability of Tax Elasticities over the Business Cycle in European Countries

We estimate short‐ and long‐run tax elasticities that capture the relationship between changes in national income and tax revenue. We show that the short‐run tax elasticity changes according to the business cycle. We estimate a two‐state Markov‐switching regression on a novel data set of tax policy reforms in 15 European countries from 1980 to 2013, showing that the elasticities during booms and recessions are statistically (and often economically) different. The elasticities of personal income taxes, corporate income taxes, indirect taxes and social contributions tend to be larger during recessions. Estimates of long‐run elasticities are in line with existing literature.     

The marginal cost of public funds is one at the optimal tax system

This paper develops a Mirrlees framework with skill and preference heterogeneity to analyze optimal linear and nonlinear redistributive taxes, optimal provision of public goods, and the marginal cost of public funds (MCF). It is shown that the MCF equals one at the optimal tax system, for both lump-sum and distortionary taxes, for linear and nonlinear taxes, and for both income and consumption taxes. By allowing for redistributional concerns, the marginal excess burden of distortionary taxes is shown to be equal to the marginal distributional gain at the optimal tax system. Consequently, the modified Samuelson rule should not be corrected for the marginal cost of public funds. Outside the optimum, the marginal cost of public funds for distortionary taxes can be either smaller or larger than one. The findings of this paper have potentially important implications for applied tax policy and social cost–benefit analysis.     

Why Capital Income Taxes Survive in Open Economies: The Role of Multinational Firms

This paper discusses the role of multinational firms and double taxation treaties for corporate income taxation in open economies. We show that it is optimal for a small open economy to levy positive corporate income taxes if multinational firms are taxed according to the full taxation after deduction system or the foreign tax credit system. Positive corporate taxes also occur in the asymmetric case where some countries apply the exemption system and others apply the tax credit system. If all countries apply the exemption system, the optimal corporate income tax is zero. We also show that, under tax competition, corporate income taxes are not necessarily too low from the perspective of the economy as a whole. While the undertaxation result is confirmed for the case of the exemption system, tax rates may also be inefficiently high if the deduction or the credit systems are applied.     

Determinants of Consumption and Savings Behavior in Developing Countries

The determinants of savings generally and the specific effectsof government policies on savings and consumption are pivotalforces in investment and economic growth. The Hall hypothesisstates that consumption is a function of lifetime ("permanent")income, rather than income in each period independently. Changesin interest and tax rates, money supply, or government expenditurewill affect permanent income and hence consumption and savingsonly if they are unexpected and thus not already incorporatedin the estimation of permanent income. We are unable to rejectthe Hall hypothesis in tests for developing countries when weallow for varying interest rates. We do find evidence of a negativeeffect of inflation on consumption, and a positive relationshipbetween the real interest rate and consumption. The evidencefor the Hall hypothesis also suggests that Ricardian equivalencemay be valid—this is Barro's hypothesis that the effecton savings is the same whether government deficits are financedthrough taxation or debt. Our preliminary testing, however,does not support Ricardian equivalence.