Optimal income transfers

A substantial literature addresses the design of transfer programs and policies, including the negative income tax, other means-tested transfers, the earned income tax credit, categorical assistance, and work inducements. This work is largely independent of that on the optimal nonlinear income tax, yet formulations of such a tax necessarily address how low-income individuals should be treated. This paper draws on the optimal income taxation literature to illuminate the analysis of transfer programs, including the level and shape of marginal tax rates (including phase-outs), the structure of categorical assistance, and the role of work inducements in an optimal income transfer scheme. JEL Classification H21 · H53 · I38     

Tax Evasion and Auditing in a Federal Economy

This paper analyzes the relation between tax auditing and fiscal equalization in the context of fiscal competition. We incorporate a model of tax evasion by firms into a standard tax competition framework where regional governments use their audit rates as a strategic instrument to engage in fiscal competition. We compare the region’s choice of audit policies for three different cases: A scenario of unconfined competition without interregional transfers, a scenario with a gross revenue equalization (GRS) scheme and finally, a scenario with net revenue sharing (NRS), where not only the revenues from taxation but also the regions auditing costs are shared. Without regional transfers, fiscal competition leads to audit rates which are inefficiently low for revenue-maximizing governments. While in general GRS aggravates the inefficiency, NRS makes the decentralized choice of auditing policies more efficient.JEL Code: H26, H71, H77     

Profit tax competition and formula apportionment

We analyze corporate income tax competition with international capital mobility when the common tax base is allocated to governments according to an apportionment formula. Labor can be either internationally mobile or immobile. We compare the Nash equilibria for different apportionment methods. Tax competition produces lower tax rates the more elastically the formula share responds to tax rate changes. More specifically, equilibrium tax rates are typically lowest when apportionment is based on property-shares, followed by payroll- and sales-shares apportionment. Compared to their cooperative levels, equilibrium tax rates are too low for property-share apportionment but tend to be too high for the other formulas. JEL Classification H77 · H25 · F23     

Optimal income support targeting

This paper considers the practical problem of distributing a fixed budget for poverty alleviation to a population whose poverty status is not directly observable. The solution we propose improves on the techniques that are commonly used in practice by taking both the concavity of the social welfare function and the entire conditional distribution of poverty status into account, and by endogenously determining the optimal transfer levels. We provide an algorithm to calculate the optimal transfers for any population of benefit applicants. Finally, we explain how our method is a generalization of statistical classification techniques and thus provide an intuitive discussion of the defects of currently operational methods. JEL CodeH2 · C4     

Policy-induced internal migration: An empirical investigation of the Canadian case

We investigate the influence of public policy on interprovincial migration in Canada using new aggregated migration data for 1974–1996, the longest period studied so far. We consider the consequences of regional variation in a variety of policies, and also investigate the effects of certain extraordinary events in Quebec and in the Atlantic provinces. The results indicate that while the changing bias in the unemployment insurance system may have induced some people to move to the relatively high unemployment Atlantic region, the resulting flows are likely too small to have altered regional unemployment rates. In contrast, political events in Quebec in the 1970's and the closing of the cod fishery in 1992 appear to be associated with large changes in migration patterns. JEL Classification H0 · H7 · J41 · J65 · R23 · R58     

Adverse selection in the annuity market with sequential and simultaneous insurance demand

This paper investigates the effect of adverse selection on the private annuity market in a model with two periods of retirement and two types of individuals, who differ in their life expectancy. In order to introduce the existence of time-limited pension insurance, we consider a model where for each period of retirement separate contracts can be purchased. Demand for the two periods can be decided sequentially or simultaneously. We show that only a situation where all risk types choose sequential contracts is an equilibrium and that this outcome is favourable for the long-living, but is unfavourable for the short-living individuals. JEL Classification D82 · D91 · G22     

Disability insurance and optimal income taxation

This paper studies the design of disability insurance scheme when agents differ in their privately known productivity. We extend the Diamond and Mirrlees (1978) two period model to allow for agents differing ex-ante in their productivity and characterize the optimal nonlinear tax transfer that maximizes a utilitarian welfare function when per-period earnings and age are observable while individuals’ productivity and health status are not observable. We show that the induced tax/benefit scheme should exhibit a marginal income tax that decreases with age for some agents. A marginal subsidy on the young high productive income may be desirable. While the disability scheme always involves the old low productive agents to be indifferent between working and claiming disability benefits, this result is not always true for the old high productive agents. JEL Classification H55 · H23 · E62     

Migration and the welfare state: The economic power of the non-voter?

This paper investigates the impact of emigration on the political choice of the size of the welfare state. Mobility has two countervailing effects: the political participation effect and the tax base effect. With emigration, the composition of the constituency changes. This increases the political influence of the less mobile part of the population. But the new political majority then also has to take into account that emigration reduces tax revenues and thereby affects the feasible set of redistribution policies. We find that the direction of the total effect of migration depends on the initial income distribution in the economy. Our results also contribute to the empirical debate on the validity of the median-voter approach in cross-country studies for explaining the relation between income inequality and redistribution levels. JEL Classification F22 · H50 · D31 · D72     

Global trading of carbon dioxide permits with noncompliant polluters

An international mechanism intended to curb global carbon dioxide emissions, mirrored after the Kyoto Protocol, is composed of decentralized regulatory and enforcement authorities and two supranational agencies that are in charge of promoting international transfers and imposing punitive fines. Regulatory enforcement is costly and imperfect. Polluting firms located in various sovereign nations may not comply with emission regulations. We show that there is a combination of decentralized emission quotas and centralized income transfers and fines, with decentralized leadership in policy making, which induces regional regulatory authorities to internalize all environmental and pecuniary externalities.      

Rent seeking and aid effectiveness

We introduce foreign aid and a rent seeking contest for public funds into the Barro (JPE 1990) growth model. We find that aid effectiveness depends on fiscal policies, the level of aid inflows and the quality of institutions that restrict appropriation of public funds by rent seeking agents. These results can be shown to be consistent with the best established findings in the empirical literature on aid effectiveness. Rent seeking may thus indeed be a major determinant of aid effectiveness. We further discuss how aid effectiveness depends on the way foreign aid is disbursed and on the determinants of institutional quality. JEL Classification F35 · D72 · D9 · H2     

A case for taxing education

In this paper we establish, contrary to conventional wisdom, a case for taxing education, as a supplement to the labor income tax, by drawing on some informational feature of education, which the government may utilize. Discretionary decisions of individuals to acquire education may serve as an additional signal (to earned labor income) on the underlying unobserved innate earning ability, thereby mitigating the informational constraint faced by the government. JEL Classification H2 · D6     

Federal fiscal transfers in monetary unions: A NOEM approach

In the debate over EMU, a widely accepted view is that a federal fiscal mechanism is needed for the participating states to cope with asymmetric shocks. In this paper, we explore the properties of federal fiscal transfer schemes with regard to their capability to stabilize national consumption, production and employment. We consider direct transfers among private sectors and indirect transfers among national fiscal authorities. We show that federal fiscal arrangements can provide perfect insurance. Our analysis builds on the New Open Economy Macroeconomics framework which allows us to portray the transmission of shocks and the properties of transfers in detail. JEL Code E42 · E63 · F33 · F42     

PAYG pension systems with capital mobility

This paper studies the design of an optimal pension scheme in an OLG and open economy model. The pension scheme provides a flat rate benefit and is based on the PAYG principle. It thus combines inter- and intra-generational redistribution. In this setting a number of symmetric economies are connected by an open and perfect capital market. When this number is very large, we have the small open economy case; when it is reduced to one, we have the case of autarky or perfect coordination. As the number of countries increases, there is more intragenerational redistribution, but less capital accumulation. JEL Code H55 · H87     

A note on risk aversion and herd behavior in financial markets

We show that differences in market participants risk aversion can generate herd behavior in stock markets where assets are traded sequentially. This in turn prevents learning of market’s fundamentals. These results are obtained without introducing multidimensional uncertainty or transaction cost. JEL Classification G1 · G14 · C11 · D82     

Education policies and optimal taxation

This paper studies the design of education policies in a setting in which optimal redistributive labor taxation is available. It is usually argued that the crucial parameter to guide education policy is the complementarity of education and ability. This is true only when labor supply is fixed or when income taxes are not allowed. I show that, if labor supply is endogenous and if the government can tax income in a nonlinear way, the crucial parameter is how the education elasticity of wage changes with ability. Taking the elasticity criterion into account, education subsidies are optimal in cases in which, under the complementarity criterion, education taxes would be optimal. To do this, I use an asymmetric information setting that motivates nonlinear taxation of income and education. JEL Classification H21 · H23 · H52 · I28     

To Invest or not to Invest: A real options approach to FDIs and tax competition

Foreign investment decisions of firms are often characterized by investment irreversibility, uncertainty, and the ability to choose the optimal timing of foreign investments. We embed these characteristics into a real option theory framework to analyze international competition among countries to attract mobile investments when firms, after the investment is sunk, can shift profit to low tax countries by transfer pricing. We find that an increase in the uncertainty of profit income reduces the equilibrium tax rates, whilst lower investment costs or larger profits, counteracts the negative fiscal externality of tax competition leading to higher equilibrium tax rates. JEL Code H25     

Candidate quality

We analyze the topical question of how the compensation of elected politicians affects the set of citizens choosing to run. To this end, we develop a sparse and tractable citizen-candidate model of representative democracy with ability differences, informative campaigning and political parties. Our results suggest that primaries, campaign costs and rewards have previously overlooked interactions that should be studied in a unified framework. Surprisingly, increasing the reward may lower the average candidate quality when the campaigning costs are sufficiently high. JEL Classification D70 · D72 · D79     

Do lack of transparency and enforcement undermine international risk-sharing?

This paper studies the extent to which poor institutions compromise risk-sharing. We model a multilateral organization as a social contract that provides insurance to members. Countries privately observe the realization of a performance variable with a verification cost that differs across countries, reflecting the “transparency” of institutions. When the level of transparency is exogenous, the optimal contract provides complete expected risk sharing across countries and states. Poor transparency and enforcement reduce consumption and result in insurance rationing. When a country can increase transparency endogenously, this generates an externality and moral hazard. We first characterize the outcome when the multilateral agency can influence members’ institutions by choosing the countries’ level of effort. Next we derive a tax/subsidy scheme that can induce countries to choose the socially optimal level. JEL Classification Numbers D8, F3 We are grateful to Biung-Ghi Ju, Ted Juhl, Donald Lien, Joseph Sicilian and Jianbo Zhang for helpful comments. We are especially grateful to an anonymous referee for comments that improved the paper substantially.     

The Effect of Volume of Intrafirm Transfers on Market Metrics

In this paper, we examine the relationship between international intrafirm area transfers and market metrics as measured by market-to-book value and systematic risk. Intrafirm transfers – the amount that multinational corporations charge one another for the transfer of goods, intellectual property, and services – have become an increasingly important issue for policymaking, managerial, financial, and tax purposes. This paper also examines whether international intrafirm intergeographic area transfers are attributed to corporate tax. We find that firms with a sizable volume of international intrafirm transfers have higher systematic risk than comparable firms without these transfers. We show cross-sectionally that firms engage in international transfers have a higher market-to-book ratio, suggesting that transfers add value through their effect on earnings and taxes. Consistent with Mills and Newberry (2003) and Collins, Kemsley, and Lang (1998), we document that U.S. (global) income tax is positively (negatively) related to intrafirm transfers, implying that U.S. multinational firms shifted taxable income to the United States from 1995 to 1999.