税收、收入不平等和内生经济增长

企业家(通过金融中介)从家庭借贷来支撑创新。二者在企业家的努力不为外人所见的情形下双方签订信用合同分享创新带来的垄断利润(即蛋糕)。两个有代表性经济人(企业家和家庭)的存在允许人们在内生经济增长模型里研究收入不平等。本文研究发现,企业家分配份额的增加一开始会提升增长速度,但是过了一定值后会拉低增长速度;而该份额的增加一直拉大企业家和工人间的收入差距。所以降低企业家获得的蛋糕的份额的分配改革可缩小收入差距。提高企业家来自创新的收入的税率将降低他们的努力程度,从而降低增长速度,但是该税率的提高有助于降低收入不平等程度。存款收入的税率提高尽管不会改变企业家的努力程度,但是也会降低经济增长速度,而且不会降低收入不平等(如果工人有一定比例的存款)。对于劳动收入(工人工资)的税率增加会加剧工人和企业家间的收入不平等,但对经济增长速度没有影响。     

The Proportionality of Electoral Systems: Electoral Welfare and Electoral Inequality

This paper argues that measuring the degree of proportionality in an electoral system is equivalent to measuring the degree of electoral inequality, defined in terms of inter-party differences in the seats-to-votes ratio. It proposes an index of the degree of electoral inequality which is based on Atkinson's (1970) index, applied originally to measuring income inequality. This index satisfies all the criteria proposed in the literature for evaluating measures of electoral proportionality. In addition, such an Atkinson-type index of electoral inequality can also be given a welfarist interpretation by directly relating its value to the level of electoral welfare. Under such an interpretation, the disproportionality in an electoral system may be interpreted as being the result of the system imputing voting shares to the different political parties which are different from their actual voting shares. The larger this difference, the greater the degree of disproportionality in the system. The use of this index is illustrated by an application to the outcomes of Irish General Elections from 1923 till 1997.     

Electoral Rules, Political Systems, and Institutional Quality

This paper explores the links between political rules and institutional quality. The paper concentrates on two political measures: the presence of checks and balances in the political system and an index of political particularism that measures the incentives for politicians to build personal support bases. The paper finds a positive correlation between checks and balances and institutional quality. It also finds that intermediate levels of particularism are associated with higher institutional quality.     

最优税收、经济增长和收入不公

1.引言在传统的公共财政文献(马斯格雷夫,1959)中,财政有三个公认的职能:(1)提供公共产品和服务;(2)收入再分配;(3)稳定经济。政府预算作为一种稳定工具来使用,在很大程度上是出于时髦的考虑,货币政策已经替代了它所发挥的作用。政府主要致力于提供公共消费和投资以及进行收入再分配。     

Optimal Age-Specific Income Taxation

This paper studies optimal earnings taxation in a three‐period life‐cycle model where taxes can be differentiated according to age. Agents choose their level of education when young and their retirement age when old. I study the problem both without and with borrowing constraints. It is shown that, without borrowing constraints, a first‐best optimum can be decentralized by setting a zero tax rate in the third period and a first‐period tax lower than the second‐period one. With borrowing constraints, the first best can no longer be achieved. The gap between the first‐ and second‐period tax rates is larger, while the third‐period tax rate is generally different from zero.     

Factor Taxation, Income Distribution and Capital Market Integration

This paper addresses the optimal mix of capital and wage taxation when policymakers maximize the political support of workers and capitalists, subject to a fixed revenue requirement. Capital market integration increases the efficiency costs of a tax on capital but simultaneously changes the political equilibrium through its effect on the distribution of factor incomes. These distributional effects are directly opposed in the capital importing and the capital exporting region. While the capital tax rate will always be lowered in the capital importing region, the tax rate in the exporting country will rise when political resistance to market-induced changes in the distribution of income is sufficiently high.     

Income Taxation, Endogenous Factor Prices and Production Efficiency

In an analysis of a two‐type income tax model with endogenous wages, this paper shows that production efficiency is violated in the optimum with (i) non‐linear and (ii) linear income taxation if and only if a distortionary tax schedule is implemented. These findings complement earlier results of the literature. In passing, it is also shown that optima with non‐linear redistributive income taxation cannot be identified with the redistributive regime if the assumption of endogenous wages is taken seriously.     

Moral Hazard,Income Taxation and Prospect Theory*

The standard theory of optimal income taxation under uncertainty has been developed under the assumption that individuals maximise expected utility. However, prospect theory has now been established as an alternative model of individual behaviour, with empirical support. This paper explores the theory of optimal income taxation under uncertainty when individuals behave according to the tenets of prospect theory. It is seen that many of the standard results are modified in interesting ways. The first‐order approach for solving the optimisation problem is not valid over the domain of losses, and the marginal tax schedule offers full insurance around the reference consumption level. The implications of non‐welfarist objectives under income uncertainty are also examined.     

Optimal Income Taxation and Job Choice

In this paper, we study optimal income taxation when different job types exist for workers of different skills. Each job type has some feasible range of incomes from which workers choose by varying labor supply. Workers are more productive than others in the jobs that suit them best. The model combines features of the classic optimal tax literature with labor variability along the intensive margin, with the extensive‐margin approach where workers make discrete job choices and/or participation decisions. We find that first‐best maximin utility can be achieved in the second‐best, and marginal tax rates below the top can be negative or zero.     

On Social Transfers and Income Taxation

In this paper we provide a different rationale for the use of social transfers. It is assumed that the government is unable to condition the (possibly nonlinear) income tax scheme on the productivity and the endowment of the citizens. However, people applying for social benefit have to demonstrate their financial assets, which is costly for the government to verify. We show that under weak conditions the government will prefer to provide social transfers that induce some voluntary unemployment to reduce the informational rent the highly productive and/or rich types obtain.     

Budget Balancedness and Optimal Income Taxation

We make two contributions to the theory of optimal income taxation. First, assuming conditions sufficient for existence of a Pareto optimal income tax and public goods mechanism, we show that if agents' preferences satisfy an extended notion of single crossing called capacity constrained single crossing, then there exists a Pareto optimal income tax and public goods mechanism that is budget balancing. Second, we show that, even without capacity constrained single crossing, existence of a budget balancing Pareto optimal income tax and public goods mechanism is guaranteed if the set of agent types contains no atoms.     

International Asset Trade,Capital Income Taxation,and Specialization Patterns

This paper constructs a small economy version of dynamic Heckscher‐Ohlin models with overlapping generations and analyzes effects of capital income taxation on the specialization pattern of the country. It is shown that once international asset trade is allowed, in the presence of international technological asymmetries, a small country eventually leads to perfect specialization in our overlapping generations model. It is also shown that the residence‐based tax has no effect on the specialization pattern while the source‐based tax has a negative effect on capital accumulation and thereby it can affect the specialization pattern of the small country.     

Income Taxation with Labor Responses

When incomes are exogenously given, U. Jakobsson ( Journal of Public Economics s 5 (1976), 161–168) proved that a progressive tax structure always reduces inequality. We investigate the implications for effective progression of relaxing the assumption of exogenous incomes when individuals have the same preferences but different talents. We extend the standard result and conclude that it is generally impossible to disentangle the respective contributions to inequality reduction of the tax schedule and agents' preferences. For a linear tax schedule to result in less unequally distributed incomes it is sufficient that the elasticity of labor supply be nonincreasing in exogenous income and nondecreasing in productivities. The latter condition proves to be necessary and sufficient when the tax schedule is proportional.     

Optimal Piecewise Linear Income Taxation

Given its significance in practice, piecewise linear taxation has received relatively little attention in the literature. This paper offers a simple and transparent analysis of its main characteristics. We fully characterize optimal tax parameters for the cases in which budget sets are convex and nonconvex respectively. A numerical analysis of a discrete version of the model shows the circumstances under which each of these cases will hold as a global optimum. We find that, given plausible parameter values and wage distributions, the globally optimal tax system is convex, and marginal rate progressivity increases with rising inequality.     

Optimal Income Taxation and International Labour Mobility

This paper considers how a linear income tax should be set optimally when individuals are internationally mobile. The optimum tax analysis is founded on a social welfare function where each individual counts in the social welfare according to residence time in the home country. The discussion of the optimal income tax is organized from two perspectives. The first relates to the optimum income tax when a uniform lump sum transfer is used, while the second concerns the optimal rate of tax when a transfer is used which depends on time of residence in the taxing jurisdiction.     

Income Distribution, Taxation, and the Private Provision of Public Goods

This article investigates the role of taxation when public goods are privately provided. Externalities between consumers via the public good are shown to cause kinks in social indifference curves. As a result, a government restricted to income taxation should engineer enough inequality to ensure there are some non-contributors to the public good. Whether commodity taxation changes this conclusion depends on the extent to which consumers "see through" the government budget constraint. If they can, inequality should still be sought. When they cannot, in contrast to the case of an economy with only private goods, commodity taxation can be used in conjunction with income transfers to achieve the first-best.     

Optimal Nonlinear Income Taxation and Heterogeneous Preferences

An attempt is made to find a nonlinear optimal income taxation structure for the Japanese income taxation system, assuming that individuals have heterogeneous preferences between income and leisure. Attention is paid to the horizontal equity considerations and the implications for income as distinguished between skilled and unskilled labour.
JEL Classification Numbers: H20, H55, I31.     

Taxation Reform and Income Distribution in Australia

This article contains an analysis of the effects of changes in the existing tax mix on the distribution of income in Australia. Shifts from direct to indirect taxes, similar to ‘Option C’ in the Government's Draft White Paper on tax reform, are considered. The general equilibrium effects of the policy changes are analysed using an extended version of the ORANI model of the Australian economy. The Shorrocks I₀ index is then used to identify the sources of inequality in the pre- and post-change distributions. The results are based on data from the ABS Income and Housing Survey for 1981–82.     

Majority Voting over Publicly Provided Goods, Redistribution, and Income Taxation

Federal, state, and many local governments make decisions that involve taxation, redistribution, and provision of public goods. Positive models to study these issues encounter the well‐known problem that majority‐voting equilibrium (MVE) may fail to exist in such multidimensional models. In this paper, with reasonable restrictions on preferences, I provide sufficient conditions for the existence of an MVE in a model with linear income tax and government expenditure policies that affect individual labor/leisure choices. My majority‐voting result takes account of the possibility that low‐skill individuals will drop out of the labor force under some tax and expenditure configurations.     

Optimum Taxation of Each Year's Income

In this paper, a two‐type, two‐period model of optimum income taxation is investigated. I assume full commitment and that current income determines the agents' tax burden in each period. It is shown that such a tax system does not allow one to implement the optimal long‐term tax contract and that it implies positive marginal tax rates at the upper end of the income distribution.