Stock returns and real activity in the G-7 countries: did the relationship change during the 1980s?

Several empirical studies show that a substantial fraction of the changes in growth rates of real activity can be explained by lagged aggregate stock return variations in the U.S. as well as in other G-7 countries from the 1950s to the 1990s. However, the results presented in Binswanger.[International Review of Economics and Finance 9 (2000) 387] indicate that this traditionally strong relation has disappeared in the U.S. in the early 1980s. This paper shows that a similar breakdown occurred in Canada, Japan and in an aggregate economy consisting of the four European G-7 countries. The results provide evidence in favor of the hypothesis that speculative bubbles during the 1980s and 1990s were an international phenomenon.     

Dynamic relationship between stock prices and exchange rates for G-7 countries

There are two major findings from our time-series estimations. First, we find that there is no long-run significant relationship between stock prices and exchange rates in the G-7 countries. This result interfaces with Bahmani-Oskooee and Sohrabian’s (1992) finding, but contrasts with the studies that suggest there be a significant relationship between these two financial variables. Our second finding is that the short-run significant relationship has only been found for one day in certain G-7 countries. For instance, currency depreciation often drags down stock returns in the German financial market, but it stimulates the Canadian and UK markets on the following day. However, an increase in stock price often causes currency depreciation the next day in Italy and Japan. In addition, we also find that the record of stock price and the value of the dollar cannot be depended on when predicting the future in the US, either in the short-run or long-run.     

NONLINEAR GROWTH EFFECTS OF TAXATION: A SEMI‐PARAMETRIC APPROACH USING AVERAGE MARGINAL TAX RATES

One of the major challenges of empirical tax research is the identification and calculation of appropriate tax data. While there is consensus that average marginal tax rates are most suitable for studying the effects of tax policy on economic growth, because of data limitations the calculation of marginal tax rates has been limited to the USA and the UK. This paper provides calculations of average marginal tax rates for the four Scandinavian countries using the methodologies of Seater (1982, 1985) and Barro and Sahasakul (1983, 1986). Then, by pooling the newly calculated tax rates for the Scandinavian countries with the data for the USA and the UK, we investigate the effects of tax policy shocks on the per capita GDP growth rate. Our results suggest that an increase in average marginal tax rates has a negative impact on economic growth. Employing additive mixed panel models with penalized splines as estimation approach, we show that changes in tax rates have nonlinear effects. Increasing average marginal tax rates turn out to be the most distorting at relatively moderate tax rates. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Taxes,economic conditions and recent trends in male self-employment: a Canada–US comparison

North American workers have increasingly turned to self-employment since the 1970s. Using microdata for the period 1983–1994 from Canada and the United States, I assess the importance of macroeconomic conditions and the tax environment in explaining the trends in male self-employment in these two countries. My findings suggest that higher income tax and unemployment rates are associated with an increase in the rates of self-employment among North American men. Changes in the tax environment account for a considerable amount of the secular trends in male self-employment over this period, while changing economic conditions played a smaller role in determining these trends.     

Japan: Is there any way out?

Of the G-7 economies Japan is expected to experience the most severe recession during 2001/02, suffering from the interaction of the dramatic cyclical factors affecting the global economy and its own severe, structural weaknesses. In this article, OEF's Simon Knapp examines how and why these weaknesses, first created in the bubble-bust period of the late 1980s / early 1990s, are continuing to affect the Japanese economy today, and discusses what options are available to the government to break free from the malaise of stagnating growth and falling prices.     

TAX COMPETITION AS A CAUSE OF FALLING CORPORATE INCOME TAX RATES: A SURVEY OF EMPIRICAL LITERATURE

Abstract Since the mid 1980s, tax rates on corporate income have declined in most industrialized countries. Tax competition between countries for mobile capital has frequently been mentioned as an explanation for this development. A vast empirical literature dealing with tax competition for mobile capital has emerged. This paper categorizes and summarizes the existing empirical studies on this issue. Particular focus is placed on the isolation of the substantive implications the quantitative study outcomes convey. Given the empirical evidence surveyed, it appears that tax rates indeed decline due to tax competition between countries, and in particular due to competition for profits. In addition to summarizing the substantive implications of the existing empirical literature, the paper addresses the question of whether the existing studies can convincingly isolate tax competition as a driver of falling corporate income tax rates.     

Labor supply responses to the 1990s Japanese tax reforms

The consumption-leisure choice model implies that an exogenous change in tax rates will induce a change in labor supply. This implication is expected to be important to labor supplied by secondary earners under a progressive tax system when spousal income alters effective marginal tax rates. This paper examines labor supply responses to the income tax changes associated with Japanese tax reforms during the 1990s. The results indicate that the hours-of-work elasticity with respect to the net-of-tax rate is 0.8 for married women.     

Global growth to 2024: reversion to which mean?

• We expect global GDP growth to average 3.5% per year (at PPP exchange rates) over the next ten years. This is lower than the 3.8% recorded in 2000–14 though not dramatically so. There will be a modest recovery in advanced economy growth ‐ but not to pre‐crisis rates. Emerging market (EM) growth will slow but remain faster than growth in the advanced economies. And with EM's share in world GDP much increased from 10–15 years ago, EMs will continue to provide a large proportion of world growth.
• EM growth is expected to run at around 4.5% per year in 2015–24, well down on the 6% seen in 2000–14. This includes a slowdown from around 10% to 5–6% in China ‐ but China's share in world GDP has risen so much that China's contribution to world growth will remain very substantial.
• Advanced economies are forecast to grow by 1.9% per year in 2015–24, a big improvement from the 1% pace of 2007–14 (which was affected by the global financial crisis) but below the 1990–2014 average. Indeed, the gap between forecast G7 GDP and GDP extrapolated using pre‐crisis trends in potential output will remain large at 10–15% in 2015–24.
• Global growth will remain relatively strong compared to much longer‐term averages: growth from 1870–1950 was only around 2% per year. But a return to such low growth rates looks unlikely; China and India were a major drag on world growth until the 1980s but are now fast growing regions.
• Our forecast is relatively cautious about key growth factors; the contribution of productivity growth is expected to improve slightly, while those from capital accumulation and labour supply fall back. Demographics will be a more severe drag on growth from 2025–40. Overall, risks to our long‐term forecasts look to be skewed to the downside.

     

Fiscal cost of demographic transition in Japan

This paper quantifies the fiscal cost of demographic transition that Japan is projected to experience over the next several decades, in a life-cycle model with endogenous saving, consumption, and labor supply in both intensive and extensive margins. Retirement waves of baby-boom generations, combined with a rise in longevity and low fertility rates, raise the old-age dependency ratio to 85% by 2050, the highest among major developed countries, and generate a significant budget imbalance, as the government faces rising costs of public pension and health and long-term care insurance. Preserving the current level of the transfers will require a major increase in taxation. Using consumption taxes to balance the government budget, the tax rate reaches the maximal value of 48% in late 2070s. A pension reform to reduce benefits by 20% results in a peak tax rate of 37%, which can be reduced further to 28% if the retirement age is also gradually raised by 5 years.     

Japan

Data from Q3 have been quite mixed, but on balance suggest that the fallout from April's sales tax hike has been worse than initially expected. The composite PMI reached a six‐month high of 52.8 in September, but the Cabinet Office's index of coincident indicators has continued to fall through Q3. On balance, we estimate that GDP was virtually flat in Q3. We thus now expect growth for 2014 as a whole to come in at 0.7%, down from 1.1% three months ago…     

Protestantism, Labor Force Participation, and Employment Across Countries

A bstract .   Using data from 80 countries, this article analyzes whether Protestant religion affects labor market outcomes. Controlling for the impact of labor market regulations, business regulations, the tax burden, the business cycle, the level of economic development, demographic and geographical conditions, wars, and the transition from planned to market economy as well as unobserved country and year effects, we find that countries in which the largest portion of the population practices Protestant religion have substantially higher labor force participation and employment rates, particularly among women. We obtain the same result for a subgroup of 19 industrial countries for which we have better data to control for the impact of labor market institutions and business cycle fluctuations.     

Growth in stress

We propose a new global risk index, Growth-in-Stress (GiS), that measures the expected fall in a country’s GDP as the global factors, which drive world growth, are subject to stressful conditions. Using the GDP growth rates of 87 countries, we find that, since the 2008 financial crisis, though mainly from 2011 on, the world overall has fallen in a state of complacency, with the cross-sectional average GiS falling quite dramatically; in 2015, the average worst outcome seems to be no growth at the 95% probability factor stress. However, the cross-sectional dispersion within groups is quite variable: it is the smallest among industrialized countries and the largest among emerging and developing countries. We also measure the factor stress on different quantiles of the GDP growth distribution of each country. We calculate an Armageddon-type event as we seek to find the GiS on the 5% quantile of growth under the extreme 95% probability events of the factors, and find that it can be as large as an annual 20% fall in GDP.     

The impact of positive property tax differentials on the timing of development

To date, few empirical studies have focused on the location decision by residential developers in response to changes in the property tax. Based on a dynamic time-to-development model by Turnbull, this paper finds, using 17 years of parcel level data from Saint Louis County, Missouri, that higher than average tax rates increase the time-to-development for vacant parcels by between 4 and 11%, all else equal. Additionally this paper finds that the tax differential effect is cumulative, resulting in about a 20% increase in the time-to-development for the parcel facing the average number of years with a higher than average rate. These results support the analytical results by both Turnbull [Turnbull, G.K., 1988. The effects of local taxes and public services on residential development patterns. Journal of Regional Science, 28 (4), 541–562.] and McMillen [McMillen, D.P., 1990. The timing and duration of development tax rate increases. Journal of Urban Economics, 28, 1–18.] that the property tax can distort residential capital markets leading to inefficient urban growth, or sprawl.     

Lowering the Marginal Corporate Tax Rate: Why the Debate?

In an effort to attract new investors and retain existing producers, governments use corporate tax rates as a policy tool for industrial recruitment, resulting in inter‐state tax competition. Foreign direct investment (FDI) growth and GDP growth are the two policy outcomes gauged in inter‐state tax competition. The assumption is that lower corporate taxes lead to increases in FDI, which results in capital formation that generates GDP growth. This 60‐nation panel study tests that assumption through examining economic indicators contingent on taxation, such as FDI and mergers and acquisitions among multinational corporations between 1999 and 2009. The results suggest that reduced corporate tax rates can increase FDI but decrease annual GDP growth. The main policy implication is that tax competition may attract investment, but may not promote overall economic growth, offering support for value‐extraction theories.     

Distortionary Taxation and Labour Market Performance

Quarterly estimates of consumption, capital and labour tax rates are provided for six major OECD countries. We then use the 'stylized facts' methodology to evaluate the strength, sign and phase of cyclical comovements between tax rates and labour market variables. Labour taxes distort labour market de-cisions and help explain why the unemployment rate is so high in continental Europe. However, labour taxes cannot be the only determinant of diverging unemployment rates since the labour force is also reduced by higher taxes. Finally, we offer some preliminary structural evidence showing employment growth in particular to be negatively related to the taxation of labour.     

Seasonal Homes and the Local Property Tax: Evidence from New York State

This study examines the growth of seasonal (i.e., second or vacation) homes and their impact on local property tax rates using evidence from towns and villages in New York State between 1990 and 2000. We find that a greater concentration of seasonal homes in a municipality is associated with a lower effective property tax rate in towns, and a higher rate in small and rural villages. An alternative measure of tax burden, property taxes as a percentage of median household income, is not related to the presence of seasonal homes in towns but is positively related in small and rural villages. Our findings for towns contradict the findings of an earlier study by Fritz (1982 ) that found that an increase in town property allocated to vacation homes was significantly associated with an increasing property tax rate, although our findings for villages supports his findings.     

Environmental taxes,reforms and economic growth: an empirical analysis of panel data

This paper explores the relationship between environmentally related taxes and the economic growth rate. The analysis also investigates whether this relationship differs between countries that have implemented environmental tax reforms (ETRs) and those that have not. Using panel data from 31 OECD countries over the period 1994–2013, the paper finds that when we allow environmentally related tax revenues to interact with an initial level of real GDP per capita, the overall revenues of these taxes are negatively associated with the economic growth rate in the short and long term. Furthermore, we show that the higher the initial level of GDP per capita, the more environmentally related tax revenues can promote the economic growth rate. The analysis also reveals that the relationship between environmentally related tax revenues and economic growth varies between countries that have a mechanism to redistribute environmentally related tax revenues and those that do not.     

Housing capital-gains taxation and homeowner mobility: Evidence from the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997

We provide new evidence on the impact of housing capital-gains taxation on homeowner behavior by examining residential mobility before and after the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 (TRA97), which generated the most sweeping reform of capital-gains taxation in the last two decades. In addition to lowering marginal tax rates on long-term capital gains for all assets, TRA97 also eliminated any differential treatment of housing gains above and below age 55, allowing all homeowners to qualify for capital-gains exclusions. Utilizing data drawn from the Current Population Survey (CPS) on either side of the law change (1996 and 1998) on homeowners just above (56–58 year olds) and below (52–54 year olds) the age-55 threshold and a reduced-form, difference-in-difference empirical approach, our estimates suggest that the repeal of the differential capital-gains tax treatment by age embodied in TRA97 had an economically important and statistically significant impact on the residential mobility of under-55 homeowners. Across a variety of specifications, the repeal raised the mobility rate by around 1–1.4 percentage points, which, for a mean mobility rate of 4 percentage points, represented an increase in the mobility rate of homeowners in their early 50s by 22–31%. Furthermore, the bulk of this effect was concentrated among highly mobile homeowners who a priori were more likely to have wanted to trade down (e.g., divorced, empty nesters), those facing higher capital gains tax rates, and those living in states that had experienced higher rates of nominal appreciation.     

Institutional determinants of the effective tax rate in G7 and BRIC countries

This paper studies the relationship between the corporate effective tax rate (ETR) and several institutional factors in the G7 and the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China). We use the panel data methodology with a data sample of 25,878 listed firms in 2010–2018. The results show that all the variables analyzed have an effect on the ETR. Some—such as the statutory tax rate, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law, and open markets—affect all countries, whereas others, such as corruption control and economic freedom, affect only the BRIC countries, and gross domestic product growth, the deficit, and gross debt only affect the G7 countries.     

税务管理现代化国际比较及对我国的启示

随着中国经济的快速增长,提高税务管理水平,实现税务管理现代化日益受到关注。本文分析了澳大利亚、美国和日本等先进国家的税务管理特点,论述了世界各个国家税务管理的改革趋势。在此基础上提出了我国税务管理存在的问题,分析国外税务管理给我国带来的启示及我国税务管理现代化的具体举措。