Fuels on the Hill

New York Times,June 27,2008 Congress has always had a soft spot for'experts'who tell members what they want to hear,whether it’s supply-side economists declaring that tax cuts increase revenue or climate-change skeptics insisting that global warming is a myth.     

Taxation and Laffer Effects on Employment and Growth

Some dangerous short- and long-term ambiguities of fiscal policies arise from the belief that Laffer effects may be generated from deficit-financed tax cuts able to stimulate aggregate demand. However, even in a supply-side framework, fiscal illusion prevents a rational perception of the effectiveness of Laffer-oriented fiscal measures. The ambiguity of the Laffer effect led to an important series of studies of Francesco Forte, designed to disclose and empirically test its interactions with short- and long-term fiscal policies on gross domestic product (GDP) growth and on other relevant macroeconomic variables. We discuss, under the Laffer perspective, some of Francesco Forte’s studies related to fiscal policy effects on the labour market and GDP growth.     

减税能否提高企业生产效率?——基于西部大开发准自然实验的研究

降低实体经济企业成本,提高其经济效率,是我国供给侧改革的核心内容,而减税政策是重中之重.文章以西部大开发作为准自然实验,基于1998-2007年工业企业微观数据,使用双重差分法研究了减税对实体经济的影响.研究发现,减税政策能够刺激实体经济发展,名义税率每下降1%,企业生产效率平均提高0.38%-0.75%.减税对企业生产效率的影响既有直接效应也存在间接效应.直接效应表现为减税有利于存续企业生产效率的提升,间接效应则表现为减税可以刺激更多的创业活动,而新进入企业比存续企业具有更高的生产效率.异质性检验表明,小企业比大企业对于减税政策更加敏感,而且减税对生产效率的影响随着时间推移先增加后减小,存在长期收敛效应.文章为我国减税政策如何影响企业生产效率提供了经验证据,对于今后税收政策的制定具有重要的理论与实践意义.     

Dynamic scoring: Alternative financing schemes

Neoclassical growth models predict that reductions in capital or labor income tax rates are expansionary when lump-sum transfers are used to balance the government budget. This paper explores the consequences of bond-financed tax reductions that bring forth a range of possible offsetting policies, including future government consumption, capital tax rates, or labor tax rates. Through the resulting intertemporal distortions, current tax cuts can be expansionary or contractionary. The paper also finds that more aggressive responses of offsetting policies to debt engender less debt accumulation and less costly tax cuts.     

Tales of fiscal adjustment

This paper examines the evidence on fiscal adjustments in OECD countries from the early 1960s to today. The results shed light on the recently observed phenomenon of fiscal tightening that produces (non-Keynesian) expansionary effects. One interpretation is that a serious fiscal tightening increases demand. Wealth rises when future tax burdens decline, and when interest rates decline credibility is restored and inflation or default risks abate. Both consumption and investment rise. For this effect to produce an expansion, the tightening must be sizeable and occur after a period of stress when the budget is quickly deteriorating and public debt is building up. Another interpretation emphasizes the supply side. Typically, a fiscal consolidation based on tax increases is short-lived. To be long lasting, it must include cuts in public employment, transfers and government wages. To be politically possible, such a policy must be supported by trade unions. These measures result in more efficient labour markets and boost the supply side. Based both on statistical evidence and on a detailed analysis of ten cases of major fiscal adjustment, this article provides cautious support to the supply-side view, without denying a more limited role for the demand-side channel.     

A macroeconomic analysis of sales and payroll tax cuts

This paper analyzes the short-run impact of sales and payroll tax cuts in a complete macroeconomic model which explicitly involves the government financing constraint. Sales and payroll tax cuts have been stressed as good measures for achieving once-for-all price level reductions. We demonstrate that in quite plausible circumstances, cuts in these taxes (financed by an increase in the personal tax rate) result in the price level increasing, not decreasing. Also, it is shown that a policy package involving a wage subsidy and a profits tax hike must involve employment and investment moving in the same, not the opposite, direction.     

Accelerated depreciation and the efficacy of temporary fiscal policy: Implications for an inflationary economy

The effect on investment of temporary tax rate changes depends on the age profile of depreciation deductions. If the depreciation allowance schedule is accelerated, then temporary cuts in the corporate tax rate could reduce investment. Inflation causes the age profile of real depreciation deductions to become accelerated and thus could make temporary tax cuts have a contractionary effect on investment. Two currently proposed reforms are shown to exacerbate this effect. Under each of these proposals, temporary tax cuts are likely to have opposite effects on investment in short-lived and long-lived capital, thereby complicating the conduct of countercyclical fiscal policy.     

Asymmetric tax multipliers

Using recently published tax series by Romer and Romer (2010) and Cloyne (2013) we examine whether or not positive and negative tax shocks have asymmetric effects on the U.S. and U.K. economies. We find that in the U.S. positive tax shocks—tax increases—do not affect output while negative tax shocks—tax cuts—have large, positive effects. In the U.K., tax increases substantially reduce output while tax cuts have no significant effect.     

Growth and Welfare Effects of Tax Cuts: The Case of a Productive Public Input with Technological Risk

This paper analyzes the dynamic impact of tax cuts within a stochastic model of endogenous growth with a congested public input. A decreasing taxation of deterministic income parts leads to the well-known positive growth effect. Nevertheless, due to the insurance effect associated with the taxation of stochastic income flows, the overall growth impact of taxation is ambiguous. It is shown that the optimal structure of financing government expenditure does not only depend on the degree of rivalry but also on the degree of risk aversion. The optimal real value of government debt decreases with a rise in congestion. We identify that in the case of proportional congestion, the base for tax cuts should be the growth neutral consumption tax. Maximizing the growth rate does not automatically coincide with maximizing welfare. Hence, the base for tax cuts gains importance to realize a welfare optimal policy.     

The effect of taxation on labour supply: the case of moonlighting

The authors provide a simple test of supply-side economics by estimating the responsiveness of moonlighting labour supply to changes in the marginal tax rate and the wage rate. While standard theory teachers that changes in taxes and wage should have opposite and equal effects on labour supply, taxes affect the entire asset position of the household. In the short run, an adjustment of hours in the second job may be the only option available to an individual in responding to a tax change. Thus, analyses based on after-tax wages may understate supply-side effects. To estimate these effects a tobit procedure is employed. The empirical results suggest a backward-bending supply curve over thet range of moonlighting hours. Data consist of a subsample of male blue-collar workers from the 1978 cross-section of the Panel study of Income Dynamics.     

The effect of death tax on the labour supply of donors: evidence from TRA97

Exploiting estate tax cuts from the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 (TRA97), this paper estimates the effect of death tax on the labour supply of living potential donors. To this end, difference-in-difference with multiple imputation approach is applied to micro-level panel data. This paper finds that the estate tax cuts makes no difference in labour force participation or working hours of potential donors in a statistically meaningful way, although the TRA97 reduces marginal estate tax rates by 37.51% on average. This finding suggests that the death tax causes no meaningful distortion of living potential-donors’ labour supplies at either extensive or intensive margin.     

Strategies for Fiscal Reform in the Context of the EMU: the Case of Portugal

The authors use an endogenous growth dynamic general‐equilibrium model, which accommodates the institutional constraints of the Stability and Growth Pact, to study tax reform in Portugal. Simulation results suggest that tax cuts financed in a nondistortionary way increase long‐term GDP; i.e., they are efficiency improving, but do not always increase welfare. The tradeoff between efficiency and welfare is alleviated when reductions in public spending or increased public indebtedness finance the tax cuts. Since these mechanisms are not realistic under the institutional setting of the Stability and Growth Pact, tax reform in Portugal must involve trading off distortionary tax margins. In this case, the best strategy to increase both efficiency and welfare is to increase investment tax credits and finance them either through personal income taxes or through employers’ social security contributions.     

On The Distributional Effects Of Reducing Capital Taxes*

This article asks whether household heterogeneity and market incompleteness have quantitatively important implications for the welfare effects of tax changes. We compare a representative‐agent economy to an economy in which households face idiosyncratic uninsurable income risk. The income process is consistent with empirical estimates and implies a realistic wealth distribution. We find that capital tax cuts imply large welfare gains in the representative‐agent economy. However, when households are heterogeneous, substantial redistribution during transition means that only a minority will support capital tax cuts, whereas most households can expect large welfare losses.     

Marketed tax avoidance: an economic analysis∗

Recent years have witnessed the growth of mass-marketed tax avoidance schemes aimed at the middle (not top) of the income distribution, with significant implications for tax revenue. We examine the consequences for the structure of income tax, and for tax authority anti-avoidance efforts, of tax avoidance of this type. In a model that allows for both demand- and supply-side considerations, we find that: there is an endogenous threshold income below which taxpayers do not avoid, and above which they avoid maximally; the per-dollar price of tax avoidance is decreasing in income under progressive taxation; endogenous adjustments in the price of avoidance make supply less responsive to anti-avoidance activity than thought previously; and avoidance may drive a non-monotone relationship between tax rates and tax revenue. These findings suggest that new approaches to anti-avoidance, beyond legal enforcement, might be needed.     

Growth Effects of Capital Income Taxes: How Much Does Endogenous Innovation Matter?

The paper compares the way economies with exogenous and endogenous innovation respond to capital income taxes. If innovation is exogenous, tax cuts increase saving. If innovation is endogenous, tax cuts increase innovation as well. Faster innovation raises capital productivity and calls forth still more saving. A larger capital stock lowers the discount rate, increases the present value of monopoly profit and calls for faster innovation. How large a difference endogenous innovation might make is an open question. We calculate numerical solutions of a model including features of the U.S. tax code that affect incentives to innovate. The results suggest that models with exogenous innovation substantially underestimate long–run effects of capital income taxes.     

On the impact of a tax shock in Portugal

In 1999, Cavaco Silva, the Portuguese Prime Minister from 1985 to 1995, proposed a comprehensive tax reform package, which is to this day the basic reference in the tax policy debate in Portugal. A tax shock would consist of 4pp cuts in the corporate income tax and in the firms social security contribution rates, and a 5pp reduction in the highest personal income tax rate. These cuts would be financed by combating tax evasion, curbing wasteful public expenditure and, if necessary, by increasing the VAT rate by up to 2pp. Using a dynamic general equilibrium model to evaluate the effects of this tax shock, we find that the long-term GDP gains would be between 0.72% and 2.91% while the effects on lifetime private welfare would range between -0.99% and 0.9%. The efficiency of this tax reform package depends critically on the way the tax cuts are financed to ensure deficit neutrality. Because investment is subject to adjustment costs, to alleviate the long-run trade-off between GDP and welfare, tax policy changes must induce a significant increase in net labor income.Received: July 2001, Accepted: March 2002, JEL Classification: C68, D58, E62, H21, H30Correspondence to: Alfredo M. PereiraA previous version of this paper was presented at the Society of Computational Economics and SPiE conferences. Thanks are due to Fernando Chau, Emanuel Santos, and two anonymous referees for very insightful comments and suggestions. The views in this article are of the authors alone and do not reflect the position of the Portuguese Ministry of Finance.     

科技政策组合的技术创新协同效应研究 ——供给侧—需求侧视角

利用2013-2016年中关村园区企业数据,将创新划分为创新倾向、技术绩效和经济绩效,以政策供给侧的政府补贴、税收优惠及需求侧的政府采购为研究对象,基于倾向得分匹配方法分析供需两侧科技政策组合的技术创新协同效应。结果表明：政策支持对技术创新存在激励效应,供给侧政策对创新倾向的激励效应最强,而需求侧政策对创新绩效的激励效应更显著;不同的科技政策组合形式均对技术创新具有激励作用,并且科技政策组合对技术创新存在协同效应。     

Does right or left matter? Cabinets, credibility and fiscal adjustments

This paper tests the widely held assumption that left-wing cabinets favor higher public spending and examines whether cabinet ideology affects the persistence of major fiscal adjustments. In a panel of large fiscal adjustments in OECD countries during the last 40 years, we find evidence that left-wing and right-wing cabinets are partisan: the left tends to reduce the deficit by raising tax revenues while the right relies mostly on spending cuts. Our testable hypothesis is that cabinets can signal commitment by undertaking fiscal adjustments in ways that are not favored by their constituencies. In other words, the left gains credibility when it cuts spending while the right becomes more credible when it increases tax revenues. Probit estimates of the determinants of persistence in fiscal adjustments confirm that spending cuts by the left and tax increases by the right are associated with persistent adjustments. The effect is significant for cuts in public spending, public consumption (wage or nonwage), increases in total revenues, direct taxes on businesses and other taxes. We test for the role of several other determinants of persistence, confirming that coalition and majority cabinets are associated with less persistence while periods of high or rising levels of indebtedness favor persistence. The estimates of the impact of ideology and other variables on GDP and its components show that it is the size of the spending cut rather than cabinet ideology that is most important.     

‘Linear’ income tax cuts: distributional effects,social preferences and revenue elasticities

The paper examines differential (yield-equivalent) distributional effects, social welfare and voting preferences as well as revenue elasticities of alternative ‘linear’ income tax cuts, each of which is progressivity-neutral with respect to a local progressivity measure. Judged by all criteria, there exists a unique preference for an income tax cut that preserves initial residual progression (or a tax increase that preserves initial liability progression).     

Spending cuts or tax increases? The composition of fiscal adjustments as a signal

This paper shows that the composition of fiscal adjustments, spending cuts versus tax increases, serves as a signal of the government's degree of collusion with special interests. The politico-economic model of fiscal policies, combining retrospective voting with common-agency-type lobbying, presents undominated separating equilibria and intuitive pooling ones, in both of which fiscal adjustments with sufficiently large spending cuts lead to incumbent reappointment whereas those with only tax increases lead to incumbent defeat. These findings are consistent with the recent empirical evidence of voters behaving as fiscal conservatives. The efficiency-enhancing aspects of the signaling mechanism and the effects of imposing a deficit limit are also analyzed.