Joint Taxation and the Labour Supply of Married Women: Evidence from the Canadian Tax Reform of 1988*

The Canadian federal tax reform of 1988 replaced a spousal tax exemption with a non‐refundable tax credit. This reduced the‘jointness’of the tax system: after the reform, secondary earners’effective‘first dollar’marginal tax rates no longer depended on the marginal tax rates of their spouses. In practice, the effective‘first dollar’marginal tax rates faced by women with high‐income husbands were particularly reduced. Using difference‐indifference estimators, we find a significant increase in labour force participation among women married to higher‐income husbands.     

Income Shifting in the Spanish Dual Income Tax*

Based on a model of behavioural response to taxes, and using the Taxpayers Panel from the Instituto de Estudios Fiscales for the period 1999–2009, we analyse whether the dual nature of the Spanish personal income tax (PIT), reinforced by the 2007 reform, has influenced taxpayers’ behaviour, causing them to convert part of their ‘general income’ (from labour, real estate or economic activities) into ‘savings income’ (from movable capital or capital gains). We also extend the analysis of income shifting and study whether Spanish taxpayers also responded to the different tax treatments given to the two types of savings income (from movable capital and capital gains) until 2007, transforming savings income from one type to the other. The results of our study demonstrate three facts. First, Spanish taxpayers did respond to the different tax rates, shifting income from the general base to different forms of savings, especially capital gains. The highest‐income individuals and the self‐employed and business owners are the groups where this behaviour was most marked. Second, the self‐employed and business owners also turned income from movable assets into capital gains, guided by their different tax rates. And third, we find signs of ‘anticipation’ and ‘learning’ effects caused by the 2007 tax reform. We believe that the results obtained will enrich the growing literature on income shifting.     

Housing and Tax Policy

This paper investigates the effects of housing‐related tax policy measures on macroeconomic aggregates using a dynamic general‐equilibrium model featuring borrowing and lending across heterogeneous households, financial frictions in the form of collateral constraints tied to house prices, and a rental housing market alongside owner‐occupied housing. We analyze the effects of various tax policies and find that they all lead to significant output losses, with large long‐run tax multipliers of around 2. Among them, reducing the mortgage interest deduction is the most effective in raising tax revenue per unit of output lost, whereas reducing the depreciation allowance for rental income is the least effective.     

Tax Reform and the Demand for Debt

This article examines the impact on household borrowing from a tax reform that implied a change from progressive to constant marginal tax rates on interest deductions. We use three alternative empirical methods to address the problem of endogenous explanatory variables, which arises when the marginal tax rate itself is a function of the amount of debt: The first approach uses instrumental variables to examine the significance of the marginal tax rate directly and produces mixed results. In the second approach we use tobit regressions based on repeated cross-sectional data to examine the correspondence between debt and income and find that the households' amount of debt were strongly and positively related to income before the tax reform and significantly more income-dependent under progressive tax rates than under the constant tax rate. Finally, using panel data covering the last year prior to the reform and the first year after, we find that the change in a household's marginal tax rate had a significant impact on the change in its amount of debt.     

Long‐Term Effects of Fiscal Policy on the Size and Distribution of the Pie in the UK*

This paper provides a joint analysis of the output and distributional long‐term effects of various fiscal policies in the UK, using a vector autoregression (VAR) approach. Our findings suggest that the long‐term impact on GDP of increasing public spending and taxes is negative, and especially strong in the case of current expenditure. We also find significant distributional effects associated with fiscal policies, indicating that an increase in public spending reduces inequality while a rise in indirect taxes increases income inequality.     

流转税和所得税的产业结构调整效应分析

以1994~2009年数据资料为基础构建VAR模型,运用协整检验分析方法、脉冲响应分析方法和方差分解分析方法对流转税和所得税影响产业结构的效应进行了研究。研究发现:从长期来说,流转税对产业结构调整的影响比较显著,而所得税相对弱些;从短期来看,所得税对产业结构调整的影响比较显著,而流转税相对较弱,但二者对产业结构调整的影响都具有滞后效应。因此,分时期区别利用流转税和所得税政策影响产业结构是必要的。     

Anticipating Tax Changes: Evidence from the Finnish Corporate Income Tax Reform of 2005*

Using register‐based panel data covering all Finnish firms from 1999 to 2004, we examine how corporations anticipated the 2005 dividend tax increase via changes in their dividend and investment policies. The Finnish capital and corporate income tax reform of 2005 creates a useful opportunity to measure this behaviour, since it involves exogenous variation in the tax treatment of different types of firms. The estimation results reveal that those firms that anticipated a dividend tax hike increased their dividend payouts in a statistically significant way. This increase was not accompanied by a reduction in investment activities, but rather was associated with increased indebtedness in non‐listed firms. The results also suggest that the timing of dividend distributions probably offsets much of the potential for increased dividend tax revenue following the reform.     

An examination of firms’ responses to tax forgiveness

This study uses state tax amnesties to examine how firms respond to forgiveness—particularly repeated forgiveness—by a taxing authority. We posit that tax forgiveness programs alter taxpayer perceptions of the probability of detection by enforcers or the probability of future forgiveness programs, either of which could affect future tax aggressiveness. We find that firms headquartered in an amnesty-granting state increase state income tax aggressiveness following the first instance of tax amnesty, relative to control firms in other states. Moreover, we find evidence that tax aggressiveness incrementally increases with each additional repetition of a tax amnesty. Finally, we find that the effect of amnesties on tax aggressiveness is more prominent for small firms, which face less scrutiny and for which the tax aggressiveness measures are less confounded. Our findings suggest that repeated programs of tax forgiveness have increasingly negative implications for corporate tax collections.     

Banks as Tax Planning Intermediaries

We provide the first large‐scale empirical evidence of banks functioning as tax planning intermediaries. We posit that some banks specialize in assisting corporate clients with tax planning. In this role, banks make use of their centrality in financial relationships; access to private information; and ability to structure, execute, and participate in tax planning transactions for clients. We measure bank‐client relationships using loan contracts and measure client tax planning using either the cash effective tax rate or the unrecognized tax benefit balance. Using a difference‐in‐differences design, we find that firms experience meaningful tax reductions when they begin a relationship with a bank whose existing clients engage in above‐median tax planning. The effects of pairing with such tax intermediary banks are concentrated in relationships with larger or longer maturity loans, clients with foreign income or greater credit risk, and when the bank is an industry specialist or has above‐median investment banking activities. Finally, we find that potential clients are more likely to choose tax intermediary banks than nontax intermediary banks, suggesting that tax intermediary banks benefit by attracting new business. Collectively, our results suggest that some banks act as tax planning intermediaries, a role beyond the traditional one of financial intermediary.     

Taxpayers' Behavioural Responses and Measures of Tax Compliance ‘Gaps’: A Critique and a New Measure

The work of Feldstein (1995 and 1999) has stimulated substantial conceptual and empirical advances in economists' approaches to analysing taxpayers' behavioural responses to changes in tax rates. Meanwhile, a largely independent literature proposing and applying alternative measures of tax compliance has also developed in recent years, which has sought to provide tax agencies with tools to identify the extent of tax non‐compliance as a first step to designing policies to improve compliance. In this context, measures of ‘tax gaps’ – the difference between actual tax collected and the potential tax collection under full compliance with the tax code – have become the primary measures of tax non‐compliance via (legal) avoidance and/or (illegal) evasion. In this paper, we argue that the tax gap as conventionally defined is conceptually flawed because it fails to incorporate behavioural responses by taxpayers. We show that conventional tax gap measures, which ignore the presence of behavioural responses, exaggerate the degree of non‐compliance. This potentially applies both to indirect taxes (such as the ‘VAT gap’) and direct (income) taxes. Further, where these conventional tax gap measures motivate reforms designed to increase the tax compliance rate, they will likely have a tax‐base‐reducing effect and hence generate a smaller increase in realised tax revenues than would be anticipated from the tax gap estimate.     

总部经济、税收背离与地方税收收入能力

区域间的税收背离是大国经济中的普遍现象,其使得一个地区潜在的税收收入能力与实际获得的税收收入出现了偏差,总部经济因素是影响地方税收收入能力实现程度的重要影响因素.通过面板数据的实证分析发现,不管是否考虑征管因素,或是分税种考察,总部经济因素对地方税收收入能力的影响效果要显著大于人均GDP增加和其他影响因素的作用,是导致地区间相对财力水平差距的重要原因.在短期内,对税收流出地区进行纵向和横向的税收转移支付是解决税收背离问题的手段之一;而在长期,需要在深入研究税收基础理论的前提下,借助构建现代税收制度的时代契机,使税收收益与税源贡献相匹配,从源头上彻底解决区域间税收背离问题.     

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.     

税收政策对调节居民收入分配的作用评析

本文就我国当前的税收政策对居民收入分配的调节作用进行了评析,认为1994年税制改革以来我国的税收政策对调节居民收入分配起到了一定的作用,但也存在调节具有累退性、调节力度弱、低收入群体负担重等问题,并在征管环节、税制调整等方面提出了相应的对策。     

建立综合和分类相结合的个人所得税征管制度研究

本文结合山东省青岛市个人所得税征管调研情况,分析了交叉型和并立型综合和分类相结合个人所得税具体征收模式对税收征管的要求,并借鉴国际先进经验,提出了具体的改革建议。     

Simplifying the personal income tax system: lessons from the 1998 Spanish reform

Governments often try to reduce the complexity of personal income tax systems by decreasing the number of tax filings. The 1998 reform of the Spanish income tax system has followed this approach by adjusting withholding on earned income to the income tax liability. In this paper, we assess to what extent the reform has fulfilled its purposes, making use of a micro‐simulation tax‐benefit model for Spain, ESPASIM. The number of individuals exempt from filing a tax return has been reduced to around half of the total number of taxpayers. However, the quantity of tax returns sent to the tax administration has not changed so much because the new withholding system adjusts taxes for only 29 per cent of those exempt. Moreover, the new system increases the overall excess of tax withholding by 1.5 billion euro. We also study alternative reforms that could achieve better results than the one implemented.     

当前我国个人所得税改革的若干问题探讨

2011年新个人所得税改革政策出台后,我国的个人所得税仍然面临诸多矛盾冲突,如缺乏整体税制设计、改革的指导思想不够明确以及改革缺乏对征管约束的考量等。应明晰个税改革的目标和责任,对改革进行准确定位;对税制进行整体设计,推动个税向综合与分类相结合的制度突破;适时跟进个税征管领域的配套改革。     

Tax credit rating and corporate innovation decisions

The tax credit rating mechanism was formally implemented in 2014. As an important tax collection and management innovation, it has attracted the attention of regulatory authorities and scholars. Different from the literature that directly examines corporate tax compliance, we focus on the impact of tax credit rating implementation on corporate research and development (R&D) investment decisions. Using listed companies’ data from 2014 to 2019, we find that companies with higher tax credit ratings invest more in innovation, because the system helps managers identify R&D opportunities, alleviates corporate financing constraints and reduces agency costs. We confirm that tax credit ratings have manifold impacts on corporate information environments and business decisions, with better ratings positively affecting firms’ business decisions. This discovery can inform tax policy reform, encourage corporate innovation and construct social credit systems.     

Payout Policy Tax Clienteles,Ex‐dividend Day Stock Prices and Trading Behavior in Germany: The Case of the 2001 Tax Reform

This paper examines the impact of the German 2001 tax reform, where Germany switched from a full imputation system to a classical system. Theory suggests that both price drop ratios and trading volume decrease following the reform. We document a significant reduction in the valuation of net dividends–in particular for high dividend yield stocks–and weakening payout policy tax clienteles. Ex‐dividend day returns are likely to be driven by short‐term traders. Though the reform removed incentives for cross‐border dividend stripping and reduced tax heterogeneity among investors, we show that the high trading volume around ex‐dividend days persists.     

“两税合一”对台湾上市公司股利税资本化的影响

本文以1994～2001年两税合一税制实施前后的台湾上市公司为样本，运用Harris-Kemsley股利税后收益模型，探讨所得税制改革对权益投资者收益的影响，以及两税合一税制的实施对股利税资本化的影响。实证结果表明：两税合一税制实施前，台湾上市公司的末分配盈余与其股利税资本化程度负相关，即股利税资本化效果存在；两税合一税制实施后，台湾上市公司的股利税资本化程度低于两税合一前的程度。     

物业税改革的经济影响:一个文献综述

自从2003年我国提出物业税改革的设想后,物业税改革成为了一个热点话题.分析物业税改革可能带来的经济影响是当前讨论的重点之一.物业税将逐渐成为地方政府的一个稳定的主要收入来源.为地方政府提供长期而稳定的激励,提高地方公共财政的效率;物业税改革在短期内会降低房价,不过幅度不会太大,也不会降低购房者的负担;物业税改革还可以提高土地资源的配置效率,一定程度上缓解由土地批租制度带来的地方政府"寅吃卯粮"的问题.