Optimal Taxation when Consumers Have Endogenous Benchmark Levels of Consumption

I examine optimal taxes in an overlapping generations economy in which each consumer's utility depends on consumption relative to a weighted average of consumption by others (the benchmark level of consumption) as well as on the level of the consumer's own consumption. The socially optimal balanced growth path is characterized by the Modified Golden Rule and by a condition on the intergenerational allocation of consumption in each period. A competitive economy can be induced to attain the social optimum by a lump-sum pay-as-you-go social security system and a tax on capital income.     

A Contribution to the Theory of Welfare Accounting

A kind of "unified theory" is proposed as a dynamic generalization of the standard consumer-surplus methodology for evaluating welfare changes. The "unified theory" allows rigorous dynamic welfare comparisons to be inferred between any two economic situations—from just knowing current incomes and observing a short-run market demand schedule. Essentially, the change in present discounted future utility is exactly captured by the formula: difference in current income plus consumer surplus . This well-known formula is thereby shown to cover a far wider class of welfare comparisons than is customarily treated in the textbook static case.     

Capital Gains and Income Arising from Nonrenewable Resources

Should capital gains be included in income arising from nonrenewable resources? In the present paper, I show that capital gains from a nonrenewable resource can be divided into two terms: real price change effects and real interest rate change effects. By application of sectoral income theory developed by Asheim and Wei (Environ Res Econ 42:65–87, 2009), only the former term is part of real income of the resource and the latter term should not be included. This result is significant in the sense that all change in real resource wealth can be included as part of real income only if future real interest rates are assumed to be constant. Hotelling rule always implies that capital gains from nonrenewable resources coincide with real interests on resource wealth; net investment generated from the resource cancels out current cash flow from the resource; and real income comes from price change effects.     

河北省行业收入差距成因及对策研究

河北省行业职工收入低、行业间收入差距大。从初次分配比例、行业对国家的贡献、行业对经济发展的贡献、行业劳动生产率四个方面对行业收入进行分析可以看出,行业垄断和劳动生产率是影响行业收入的主要原因。因此,我们应转变观念,正确认识增加居民收入对经济增长的促进作用,加大消费带动行业发展;建立稳定的工资调整机制,使居民收入的增长和经济增长相协调;建立完善的收入分配调节机制,强化政府的分配调节职能;构建适应社会主义市场经济要求的人力资本定价机制,打造初次分配的公平基础。     

收入不平等对经济增长影响的实证研究

采用联立方程分析方法,实证分析了收入不平等对经济增长影响的三种机制,探讨了收入不平等如何通过影响物质资本投资、人力资本投资和居民消费来作用于经济增长。结果表明,从长期看收入不平等的扩大会刺激物质资本投资,但不利于人力资本投资和居民消费增长,收入不平等对经济增长的长期影响为负。因此,从经济发展的角度政府不应容忍收入不平等的过分扩大。     

The Concept of Income in a General Equilibrium

This paper derives a concept of aggregate real income for a competitive economy in general equilibrium consisting of heterogeneous infinitely lived people and relates it to current and future consumption possibilities. An important characteristic of our measure of income, which we call Real Income, is that deflation is carried out using a consumption deflator rather than any price index of output. We suggest that it may be inappropriate to regard capital gains as income. We also present a coherent treatment of the effects of changes to the terms of trade on Real Income and explain the implications of this for resource-exporting economies.     

LUXURY AND WEALTH*

I develop a dynamic theory of luxury consumption, particularly emphasizing the causal effect that pursuit of luxury goods has on wealth accumulation. A quasi‐luxury is defined as a good whose marginal rate of substitution is increasing in a utility index. Under certain conditions, it is indeed a luxury good. When current wealth holding falls short of (exceeds) long‐run needs, luxury consumption is postponed more (less) easily than necessity consumption, due to a lower (higher) time preference for luxury and/or a higher intertemporal elasticity of substitution thereof. Preferences for quasi‐luxuries lead to a higher steady‐state value of wealth or capital.

相似文献   

CAPITAL MAINTENANCE AND THE MEASUREMENT OF CORPORATE INCOME

This paper considers the impact upon measures of corporate income of a number of concepts of the maintenance of the existing capital of an incorporated trading enterprise. A main distinction is drawn between the maintenance of all the assets employed in trading and the maintenance of the net assets attributable to the owners. Measures of income and of rates of return to capital depend on whether all the assets, or only the net assets attributable to the owners, are being considered. There are three sections of the paper after an introduction. Section 2 is conceptual and section 3 illustrates the concepts, with figures for U.K. manufacturing industry in 1975 to 1977, in which the figures in company balance sheets are adjusted from book values to estimated replacement cost, and estimates are made of depreciation at replacement cost and of the consumption of stock (inventories) at replacement cost. These figures follow the concept of maintaining physical assests. I have added calculations which extend the concept of capital maintenance to all operating or trading assets, including monetary working capital; and which then calculate the amounts necessary to maintain the assets attributable to the owners of a business. The three main methods are: to apply a gearing adjustment to abate the additional capital maintenance provisions for operating assets (which are realized revaluations by reference to their original cost); to take into income additionally the geared (or debt financed) portion of unrealized revaluations; and-what is conceptually much the same thing-to count as the charge for debt only real interest (which may be negative) rather than nominal interest. Section 4 considers some problems of aggregation, particularly the derivation of aggregates for the sectors of the economy, when based on figures for individual enterprises using the various approaches to capital maintenance.     

MeasuringIncome and Measuring Sustainability

We examine what interpretation can be given to inclusive income , understood to be consumption plus the value of the net increase in all relevant capital stocks. We introduce the concept of instantaneously constant value income , defined as the maximum amount the economy can consume at a moment of time and keep the expected present value of utility of current and future generations constant. We argue that this income concept captures some of the concerns underlying sustainability. Our main result is that inclusive income equals instantaneously constant value income . We show that this result holds in a very general setting and, in particular, carries over to models incorporating technological progress when such progress can be captured by augmented stocks of knowledge. An important implication of our main result is that it provides a very simple method for deriving inclusive income, which does not involve any linearization of the Hamiltonian.     

中国农村居民效用测算研究——基于综合比例效用恒等式的检验及应用

文章基于西方经济学主流效用理论对消费者的效用测算问题没有给出明确答案这一事实,探索构建比例效用理论推导综合比例效用恒等式,并利用我国2001-2010年27个省份农村居民收入消费数据的面板SUR模型对综合比例效用恒等式进行了验证,同时测算了农村居民效用水平。结果显示:(1)农村居民效用水平在2001-2005年间较高,但下降趋势明显,2006-2010年间保持稳中略升;(2)河南、西藏和四川长期处于消费不足状态,山东长期处于消费过度状态;(3)中等收入省份农村居民消费潜力最大。     

“人以群分”非市场互动和群分效应的文献评论

由于存在着非市场的互动，市场的均衡结果是人们按不同的收入和社会地位而分层，从而出现“群分效应”，在现实中又突出地表现为居住区的分割，这对于低收入阶层的收入、人力资本积累和公共品消费有着显著的负面影响。政府应在开展实证研究的基础上，有针对性地采取一些经济和社会政策减少群分效应和居住区分割的负面影响，促进经济发展和社会和谐。     

劳动收入份额、城乡收入差距与中国居民消费

本文建立了一个包含人力资本人口分组的新古典经济增长模型,从理论上分析了劳动收入份额、收入差距与总消费三者之间的关系,然后使用1990—2008年的省际面板数据,采用动态GMM估计方法,重点检验国民收入分配结构、城乡居民收入差距以及它们的交互作用对中国居民消费率的影响,揭示了中国消费率偏低的动态形成机制。研究发现,劳动收入份额和城乡收入差距是居民消费增长缓慢最根本的原因;城市化水平、消费习惯形成和人口年龄结构对居民消费率也有重要的潜在影响;提高劳动要素份额具有缩小城乡收入差距的效应。尽管使用了不同的识别方法与计量技术并控制了其他潜在影响居民消费率的各种因素,本文的结果依然基本稳健。     

Soviet theories of economic demography: a survey

At this time Soviet demographic scientists maintain the position that population problems may in fact exist temporarily under socialism but that the planning principle will allow society to resolve population problems, through the use of the administrative, moral, and economic levers (subsidies, government policies, propaganda, education) emphasized by Urlanis (1974) and others. For planners to deal effectively with population management, the determinants of fertility and labor force participation must be established. The foundations of Soviet theories of human capital and fertility were laid by several writers. For the sake of simplicity, these are referred to as the Urlanis-Strumilin model, named after 2 pioneer researchers in Soviet demography and manpower economics. The formulations are based upon the writings of Strumlin (1964) and Urlanis (1974), supplemented by writings of numerous other Soviet researchers. Although their models avoid neoclassical terms such as marginal utility and income and price elasticities, they clearly employ these concepts. The Urlanis-Strumilin model, reduced to its basic elements, is a direct household utility maximizing model. The husband and wife, the household decision makers, must select optimal levels of child "quantity," child "quality," leisure, their own human capital (further education and training), and other goods. The Soviet theory recognizes that an increase in household income will increase relatively the demands for income elastic goods. The model postulates that the demand for child quality is inversely related to the price of children. The price of children is the opportunity cost of children, the major element of which is the income foregone by the mother in the course of childbearing and childrearing. The child quantity demand schedule has elastic and inelastic portions. The marginal utility of the 1st child is great. The marginal utilities of higher order children decline substantially. Families with at least 1 child can make substitutions between having more children and raising the quality of children already born. The question is what does the model predict will happen to fertility with economic development. The positive income effect will be limited as increased income is channelled into child quality and other superior goods rather than child quantity. The Urlanis-Strumilin model of labor supply assumes that the household allocates its time among market employment, household production. The model shows that the effect of children on female labor supply is not ambiguous. The presence of young children raises the value of home services and lowers long run market wages, thereby reducing female market labor supply. According to the model, the socialist state can manipulate labor supplies through several channels. It can reduce the value of home services by providing market substitutes. Soviet writers recognize the linkages between labor supply and fertility without formalizing the simultaneous relationship. The comparative statics of the Soviet model are essentially the same as those of the neoclassical model: an increase in "costs" of children will have, at best, a small positive impact on fertility.     

Capital liquidity and residents’ consumption decision: An asymmetry analysis of economic prosperity

Among the current literatures that discuss the influence exerted on residents’ consumption behavior by capital liquidity, some often independently decide the demarcation point of the liquidity restriction that affects residents’ consumption behavior, without taking into account when the economy is flourishing whether residents will be influenced by the restriction of the liquidity that their consumption behaviors can not be fully carried out. We introduce a threshold model which varies according to the actual GDP and other financial indicators (money supply, average stock index and balance of bank loans) to discuss residents’ consumption behavior in China under different economic states. The empirical results show that when the economy flourishes or resuscitates, residents’ income of the same period have not notable influence on their consumption, which suggests that residents’ consumption behavior does not considerably change according to the fluctuation of the current income, but conforms with the constant income-life cycle hypothesis. Moreover, two estimated values 0.7504 and 0.8597, as economic boom measures, all fall in the boom stable stage—basically consists with the early-warning index of the macro-economy boom issued by National Bureau of Statistics of China. It shows that the macro-economic boom is not notablely influenced by capital liquidity, so is residents’ consumption behavior.     

True indexes and rational habit formation

In this paper we discuss the construction of true indexes when tastes change endogenously. True indexes take the substitution possibilities of the consumer to a changing economic situation into account when equating the utility level of a particular period to the utility level attained in the base period through an appropriate change in income or the wage level. When tastes change endogenously, the current decision depends on the past history of consumption but, by the same token, the future path of consumption will depend on the current choice. In a true index, these intertemporal links of the current decision have to be taken into account. For a particular specification of the habit formation process, this is achieved by an appropriate transformation of prices and expenditures. A true intertemporal wage index is computed for the period 1946–1967 in the U.S. Because of increasing needs and intertemporal rationality, this index is roughly constant and equal to 1: real wages remained constant!     

On the Transmission Mechanism of Monetary Constraints to the Real Side of the Economy

Contrary to the predictions of the theory underlying international finance, inflows of capital triggered by financial liberalisation have neither equalised real interest rates nor increased income growth in many emerging economies. We explain this puzzle by developing a model that combines the balance‐of‐payments constraint approach to economic growth with a less stringent version of the real interest rate parity hypothesis. The model’s foundations are based on robust empirical findings or well‐established macroeconomic models. We show that a perverse combination of income elasticities of demand for imports and exports generates slow income growth and high real interest rates. As domestic income grows and imports rise faster than exports, the real exchange rate is expected to depreciate in order to clear the balance of payments (or the foreign exchange rate market). An incipient capital outflow arises and interest rates increase. Faster adjustment in capital rather than in the goods market therefore generates a higher real interest rate differential between the domestic small open‐economy and the rest of the world. The long run analysis shows that a constant degree of risk aversion implies a positive equilibrium real interest rate differential that affects economic growth. A permanent increase in default risk driven by persistent current account imbalances thus impacts on long run growth. The model’s results are illustrated with evidence from the three major Latin America economies: Argentina, Brazil and Mexico.     

A many-person Ramsey tax rule

Define the social marginal utility of an individual's income as the gain to society of a unit of consumption by the individual plus the value of his marginal propensity to pay taxes out of income. This concept rather than the social marginal utility of consumption (equal to the first term above) seems helpful in understanding optimal tax first order conditions. For example, with many consumers (and a poll tax as well as excise taxes) the change in aggregate compensated quantity demanded is proportional to the covariance between individual quantities demanded and social marginal utilities of income.     

The regulation of unstable growth: I'éecole de régulation and the social structure of accumulation

The economic growth condition of parallel developments in consumption and production has been placed by the French regulation school and the social structure of accumulation approach in the policy context of the distribution of class income. The implications are that there exists some unique income distribution compatible with growth, and that the post-1973 growth slowdown was the cause of labour becoming so strong as to ‘weaken’ capital. This condition of growth has close affinity with early growth theory and is presented here in terms of a Harrod-Domar ‘knife-edge’ instability. Starting from this perspective, I argue first, that the conditions of long-term growth cannot be applied to medium-term policy horizons, and secondly, that this domestic regulation is no longer dominant in an international environment in which national economies have increasingly become more open to trade and/or capital transfers. This consideration, illustrated by the instances of Canada and the NICs, suggests the existence of a different form of growth/income regulation in which the ‘knife-edge’ is exported. The policy implications for the national labour movement is then more complex and perhaps less constraining than that suggested by the two approaches under discussion.     

如何运用资金时间价值原理解决林木损失额中滞延费的计量问题

文章提出对于能带来一定程度固定收益的林木类型，在计量其林木损失额时必须要考虑资金时间价值损失的问题，进一步提出以“滞延费”表示林木的资金时间价值损失额。运用资金时间价值原理，结合森林资源资产评估中的收益现值法和重置成本法，分别提出用材林和经济林滞延费的计算公式。此外，结合北京地区实际情况，对计算公式中涉及的主要因素如预期收益、实际造林成本损失额的计算方法，以及主伐时间、林分单位面积年生长量、平均出材率、单位面积实际造林成本、物价指数年增长率、经济寿命等主要参数的计算与确定进行了阐述与说明。