Would a Flat‐Rate Tax Stimulate Entrepreneurship in Germany? A Behavioural Microsimulation Analysis Allowing for Risk*

When potential income tax reforms are debated, the suspected impact on entrepreneurship is often used as an argument in favour of or against a certain policy. Quantitative ex‐ante evaluations of the effect of certain tax reform options on entrepreneurship are very rare, however. This paper estimates the ex‐ante effects of the German tax reform 2000 and of two hypothetical flat‐rate tax scenarios on entries into and exits out of self‐employment based on a structural microsimulation model with econometrically estimated transition rates under risk. The simulation results indicate that flatter tax systems do not encourage people to choose self‐employment, but rather discourage them from doing so. This is explained by the reduction of entrepreneurs' income risk through progressive taxation.     

Optimal taxation and redistribution in an OLG model with unemployment

This paper concerns redistribution via nonlinear income taxation in an overlapping generations model with two ability-types. We assume that the wage rates are determined by bargaining between unions and firms, meaning that the equilibrium is characterized by involuntary unemployment. We show that the policy instruments that are used to calculate the marginal labor income tax rate for each ability-type give rise to intertemporal tax base effects. In addition, since the relationship between the employment and the capital stock implies intertemporal production inefficiency at the second best optimum, imperfect competition in the labor market may itself justify capital income taxation.      

Tax Systems in the World: An Empirical Investigation into the Importance of Tax Bases, Administration Costs, Scale and Political Regime

We study the structure of taxation in a sample of 100 democratic and nondemocratic regimes over three time periods. The results provide strong support for several regularities in the world as a whole, specifically (1) scale effect: utilization of each tax source increases as the government expands, (2) base effect: tax systems rely more heavily on relatively larger tax bases, and (3) administrative cost effect: lower costs of administration lead to increased reliance on the corresponding revenue source. We also investigate the role of political regime and find that democracies rely substantially more on other income taxation, possibly because this tax source requires a higher degree of voluntary compliance. JEL Code: H2, D72, D78, E31, E51, F13, P35     

Social insurance,incentives and risk taking

From the perspective of parents, redistributive taxation can be seen as social insurance for their children, for which no private alternative exists. Because private insurance comes too late during a person's life, it cannot cover the same risks as social insurance. Empirically, 85% of social insurance covers risks for which no private insurance would have been available. Redistributive taxation can be efficiency enhancing, because it creates safety and because it stimulates income generating risk taking. However, it also brings about detrimental moral hazard effects. Both the enhancement of risk taking and the moral hazard effects tend to increase the inequality in the economy, and, under constant returns to risk taking, this increase is likely to be strong enough even to make the net-of-tax income distribution more unequal. Optimal redistributive taxation will either imply that the pie becomes bigger when there is less inquality in pre-tax incomes or that more redistribution creates more post-tax inequality.The author gratefully acknowledges reserach assistance by Claudio Thum and useful comments by two anonymous referees. The paper is a broadened and non-technical discussion that draws on previous writings by the author on the subject. See in particular Sinn (1995).     

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.     

Removing Homeownership Bias in Taxation: The Distributional Effects of Including Net Imputed Rent in Taxable Income

The income tax systems of most countries entail a favourable treatment of homeownership, compared to rental‐occupied housing. Such ‘homeownership bias’ and its consequences for a wide range of economic outcomes have long been recognised in the economic literature. Although a removal of the homeownership bias is generally advocated on efficiency grounds, its distributional implications are often neglected, especially in a cross‐country perspective. In this paper, we aim to fill this gap by investigating the first‐order effects, in terms of distribution of income and work incentives, of removing the income tax provisions favouring homeownership. We consider six European countries – Belgium, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands and the UK – that exhibit important variation in terms of income tax treatment of homeowners. Using the multi‐country tax benefit model EUROMOD, we analyse the distributional consequences of including net imputed rent in the taxable income definition that applies in each country, together with the removal of existing special tax treatments of incomes or expenses related to the main residence; thus, we provide a measure of the homeownership bias. We implement three tax policy scenarios. In the first, imputed rent is included in the taxable income of homeowners, while at the same time existing mortgage interest tax relief schemes and taxation of cadastral incomes are abolished. In the two further revenue‐neutral scenarios, the additional tax revenue raised through the taxation of imputed rent is redistributed to taxpayers, through either a tax rate reduction or a tax exemption increase. The results show how including net imputed rent in the tax base might affect inequality in each of the countries considered. Housing taxation appears to be a promising avenue for raising additional revenues, or lightening taxation of labour, with no inequality‐increasing side effects.     

Tax avoidance and ex ante cost of capital

This study examines the association between tax avoidance and ex ante cost of equity capital. Based on prior research, we develop two proxies for investors’ expectations of tax avoidance and explore whether deviations from those expectations result in higher ex ante cost of equity capital. We find that the ex ante cost of equity capital increases with tax avoidance that is either below or above investor expectations and that the increase is larger for tax avoidance that exceeds investors’ expectations. We then examine whether firms that alter their future tax avoidance exhibit a lowering of their ex ante cost of equity capital and find that tax avoidance decreases (increases) from the prior year for firms that were above (below) investors’ expectations in the prior year. These results are consistent with the trade‐off suggested by the Scholes and Wolfson framework and reinforce the notion that balancing tax benefits and non‐tax costs is an important feature of firms’ tax planning.     

The theory of optimal taxation: what is the policy relevance?

The paper discusses the implications of optimal tax theory for the debates on uniform commodity taxation and neutral capital income taxation. While strong administrative and political economy arguments in favor of uniform and neutral taxation remain, recent advances in optimal tax theory suggest that the information needed to implement the differentiated taxation prescribed by optimal tax theory may be easier to obtain than previously believed. The paper also points to the strong similarity between optimal commodity tax rules and the rules for optimal source-based capital income taxation.      

Nonoptimality of the Friedman Rule with Capital Income Taxation

This paper studies the efficient taxation of money and factor income in intertemporal optimizing growth models with infinite horizons, transaction costs technologies, and flexible prices. Second‐best optimality calls for a positive inflation tax and a nonzero capital income tax when there are restrictions on taxation of production factors or profits/rents. Our cases of nonoptimality of the Friedman rule—which differ from those of Mulligan and Sala‐i‐Martin (1997) and extend substantially those of Schmitt‐Grohè and Uribe (2004a) —follow from the violation of the Diamond and Mirrlees (1971) principle on production efficiency.     

International tax arbitrage,financial parity conditions and preferential capital gains taxation

Using a finite-horizon general equilibrium model with uncertainty and money, we characterize situations where tax arbitrage opportunities may arise for international portfolio investors in an economy with heterogeneous capital income taxation when interest income and capital gains/losses are taxed differentially for some agents. We derive tax-modified uncovered interest parity conditions, Fisher conditions and forward prices similar to the no-tax ones, but augmented by tax-induced ‘risk-premium’ terms; covered interest parity and Fisher conditions remain unaffected by the introduction of capital income taxes as we bound tax-based arbitrage without restricting arbitrage per se.     

传统逃税理论模型的进一步修正:以中国现行税制为框架

在现行税制基础上对逃税影响因素的分析更有针对性。在同时考虑选流转税和所得税的情况下，所得额多少及流转税税率高低对申报收入的影响方向都是不明确的；所得税税率对申报收入的影响在“负所得税“制度情形下，才会有利于鼓励诚实纳税，在其他情形下是不确定的；罚款率和查获概率的提高有助于减少逃税。     

Neutral Taxation of Shareholder Income

A Norwegian tax reform committee recently proposed a personal tax on the realized income from shares after deduction for an imputed risk-free rate of return. This paper describes the design of the proposed shareholder income tax and shows that it will be neutral with respect to investment and financing decisions and decisions to realize capital gains, provided that full loss offsets are granted. Thus the tax allows some non-distortionary double taxation of corporate equity income. With an appropriate choice of tax rates, it also solves the problem of income shifting under a dual income tax. JEL Code: H24, H25     

提高企业所得税征管质量和效率的探讨

目前在企业所得税征管方面还存在许多问题.提高企业所得税征管质量和效率的措施包括:加强企业所得税日常管理工作;加大对税务人员的培训力度;加大对纳税人关联企业交易往来的监控;严格审核纳税人申报的财产损失;提高税务稽查选案的准确率;保证税务稽查有的放矢,提高税务稽查的质量和效率.     

Fundamental Tax Reform in The Netherlands

The Netherlands has abolished the tax on actual personal capital income and has replaced it by a presumptive capital income tax, which is in fact a net wealth tax. This paper contrasts this wealth tax with a conventional realization-based capital gains tax, a retrospective capital gains tax with interest on the deferred tax, and a mark-to-market tax which taxes capital gains as they accrue. We conclude that the effective and neutral taxation of capital income can best be ensured through a combination of (a) a mark-to-market tax to capture the returns on easy-to-value financial products, and (b) a capital gains tax with interest to tax the returns on hard-to-value real estate and small businesses.     

The Corporate Propensity to Save

Why do corporations accumulate liquid assets? We show theoretically that intertemporal trade‐offs between interest income taxation and the cost of external finance determine optimal savings. Intriguingly, we find that, controlling for Tobin's q, saving and cash flow are negatively related because firms lower cash reserves to invest after receiving positive cash‐flow shocks, and vice versa. Consistent with theory, we estimate negative propensities to save out of cash flow. We also find that income uncertainty affects saving more than do external finance constraints. Therefore, contrary to previous evidence, saving propensities reflect too many forces to be used to measure external finance constraints.     

On taxing capital income with income shifting

We examine a linear capital income tax and a nonlinear labor income tax in a two-type model where individuals live for two periods. We assume that taxes are paid only in the second period in which the agents receive both labor and capital income and may shift income from labor to capital. The two types of individuals may differ with respect to wage rate and initial resource endowments. In the absence of income shifting, endowment variation motivates a capital income tax which would not exist where there is pure wage rate variation. In the latter circumstance, income shifting would indeed establish a case for a capital income tax while adding variation in resource endowments would ambiguously affect the case. The asymmetric information case for a capital income tax must be traded off against distortionary effects not only on savings, but also on labor as an agent may earn labor income which is reported and taxed as capital income.      

Capital Mobility and Source-Based Taxation of Capital Income in Small Open Economies

This paper examines the taxation of capital income in a small open economy that faces a highly elastic supply of internationally mobile capital and increasing tax competition. The analysis considers a wide variety of additional factors that affect the determination of capital income taxation policy, including the desire to tax economic rents earned by foreign and domestic firms, the desire to take advantage of any treasury transfer effects, the role played by transfer pricing and other financial accounting manipulations by foreign multinationals, the need for a backstop to the personal income tax and various political concerns. The paper evaluates several potential income and consumption-based tax reforms in this context. JEL Code: H21, H25, H87     

Ex Post Moral Hazard and Bayesian Learning in Insurance

We study a dynamic insurance market with asymmetric information and ex post moral hazard. In our model, the insurance buyer's risk type is unknown to the insurer; moreover, the buyer has the option of not reporting losses. The insurer sets premia according to the buyer's experience rating, computed via Bayesian estimation based on buyer's history of reported claims. Accordingly, the buyer has strategic incentive to withhold information about losses. We construct an insurance market information equilibrium model and show that a variety of reporting strategies are possible. The results are illustrated with explicit computations in a two‐period risk‐neutral case study.     

Financing Public Goods with Income Taxation: Provision Rules vs. Provision Level

Due to the use of distortionary taxation, many believe that real-world economies should attain a lower level of public expenditures than in a situation where lump-sum taxes are available. The present paper examines this hypothesis by means of the two-type self-selection model of income taxation. Based on the findings of Boadway and Keen (1993), I provide sufficient conditions for both a lower and a higher level of public expenditures in second best than in first best. In particular, it is shown that the separability assumption of Christiansen (1981) leads to under-provision of the public good in the income tax optimum.     

Pure Versus Mutual Health Insurance: Evidence From Swedish Historical Data

Using data from voluntary Swedish health insurance societies 1902‐1910, this article analyzes the coexistence of pure and mutual insurance societies where pure societies are characterized by charging ex ante premiums only while mutuals in addition charge ex post assessments. On average, mutual insurance societies are found to be larger and to offer greater insurance coverage per member. Pure insurance societies have, on average, higher insurance coverage per day, greater mean levels of moral hazard controls, a higher mean number of policy categories, and greater longevity.