Debt and Currency Crises—Complements or Substitutes?*

Debt and currency crises are closely interlinked through the government's intertemporal budget constraint. The default tax and the inflation/devaluation tax can be considered as alternative means of financing. Our empirical analysis finds that high‐debt countries choose default rather than inflation/devaluation for financing, while a high money stock reduces the probability of debt crises. Further, we find strong evidence that debt and currency crises share common fundamental causes. Finally, there is a Granger causality running from debt crises to currency crises, but only weakly in the other direction.     

THE NUMBER OF FIRMS AND THE POLITICS OF STRATEGIC TRADE POLICY

Incorporating home firms' lobbying in a country into a third market model of oligopoly, this paper studies how such lobbying affects the government's strategic export policy scheme. We pay special attention to the home firms' lobby formation and its effect on domestic welfare. The home firms can organize a lobby more easily when the number of their rival foreign firms is larger than that of them, and/or when the government is overly concerned with political contribution relative to domestic welfare. The strategic export policy under lobbying cannot improve the domestic welfare, which depends on the number of firms, the government's concern about political donation and the level of socially wasted lobbying costs.     

Political economy of taxation,debt ceilings,and growth

This study presents voting on policies, including labor and capital income taxes and public debt, in an overlapping-generations model with physical and human capital accumulation, and analyzes the effects of a debt ceiling on a government's policy formation and its impact on growth and welfare. The results show that the debt ceiling induces the government to shift the tax burdens from the older to younger generations, but stimulates physical capital accumulation and may increase public education expenditure, resulting in a higher growth rate. Alternatively, the debt ceiling is measured from the viewpoint of a benevolent planner and lowering the debt ceiling (i.e., tightening fiscal discipline) makes it possible for the government to approach the planner's allocation in an aging society.     

Capital Structure Premium in Multinational SOEs: Evidence from China

We investigate the relationship among multinational operations, ownership and capital structure using data from China's A‐share listed companies. We find that, in general, multinational enterprises (MNEs) have lower leverages than domestic enterprises (DEs). More importantly, we document a capital structure premium in China's multinational state‐owned enterprises (SOEs). Since the state supports multinational SOEs that promote overseas national strategy, these multinational SOEs will have higher credit availability and therefore higher debt–equity ratios. This study sheds light on the Chinese government's impact on firm's creditability.     

Odious Debt in an Imperfect World

The odious debt problem refers to a government's ability to borrow for elite consumption while the general population repays. Although an intuitive response is to ban lending to such regimes, this paper shows that if a government faces endogenous replacement risk, then an international odious debt doctrine which (i) decreases the country's debt ceiling; (ii) decreases the likelihood that the citizens must repay the debt; or (iii) increases the government's cost of borrowing for a given default risk can all decrease citizens' welfare. These findings suggest that, even when a regime is clearly odious, allowing it to borrow up to a point may be preferable to a complete lending ban.     

Portfolio Implications of an Equity Rain in Australia*

In the next decade Australia will experience a substantial privatization program. This represents a switch away from public debt financing towards public equity financing. In this paper, estimates of the likely effect of the government's privatization program on corporate financing are provided. The main result of an increase in the supply of equities along with a commensurate reduction in the supply of government debt is to cause a significant increase in the relative cost of equity, thereby creating incentives for corporate financiers to emphasize reliance on debt financing relative to equity financing. The estimated effect on the weighted cost of finance in the economy, while positive, is small     

Internalizing the Social Costs of a Small Number of Powerful,Overindebted Firms

Extraordinary debt-to-capital ratios (leverage) and the compression of markets to very few, large companies (concentration) are economic risk factors. They have contributed to vast social costs during the current economic crisis in the USA and in Europe. This theoretical study internalizes these social costs via two market-based policy instruments for the first time in a real-economy Dixit–Stiglitz framework: a tax on firms' debt capital use and a subsidy for market entrants. It helps understand the complex real-economic mechanisms that these policy instruments cause, it derives intuitive rules of thumb for setting the tax rate and the subsidy level so that they elevate welfare, and it suggests ways to practically implement the policies.     

Taxation of firms with unknown mobility

We analyze optimal business tax policy when some firms are able to escape taxation by moving abroad. In contrast to the existing literature, we assume that the true number of mobile firms is ex ante unknown. While the government may learn from the firms' location responses to past tax rate changes, firms may anticipate this and adjust their choices accordingly. We find that incomplete information on mobility substantially affects the properties and the implications of equilibrium policy choices. First, the government may find it optimal to set a tax rate that triggers partial firm migration but full revelation of the true number of mobile firms. Second, we show that, if the firms' outside option is attractive (i.e., relocation cost and foreign tax rates are low), expected tax rates and expected firm migration are higher if the degree of mobility is unknown. Third, there is a positive value of learning, i.e., commitment on future tax rates cannot increase the government's expected revenue. However, if the government can commit to a rule‐based learning mechanism, i.e., credibly tie its future tax policy to present policy outcomes, it may obtain a Pareto improvement.     

The impact of the 2008 German corporate tax reform: A dynamic CGE analysis

In this paper we develop the dynamic CGE model, ifoMod, which is designed to analyse the impact of fundamental tax reforms and in particular capital income tax reforms for Germany. The model is in line with neoclassical growth theory and features all important behavioural interactions between the four major building blocks of an economy including the firm and household sector, the government and the rest of the world. We consider firms of different legal forms which all face an intertemporal investment problem, a financing problem w.r.t. the optimal choice of debt and equity financing as well as a factor input problem when deciding on the optimal amount of different skill types of labour employed. We show the impact of different types of taxes on the behavioural margins of firms and households. The conducted simulation shows the impact of the latest German corporate tax reform of 2008 on the German macroeconomic variables such as investments, GDP, consumption and household's welfare.     

War finance and the baby boom

In this paper, I extend the Barro–Becker model of endogenous fertility to incorporate specific fiscal policies and use it to study the effects of the fiscal policy changes following WWII on fertility in the United States. The US government went through large changes in fiscal policy after the beginning of WWII. The marginal income tax rate for an average American jumped from 4% on average before 1940 to approximately 25% during the war and stayed around 20% afterwards. The government debt–GDP ratio jumped from approximately 30% on average before WWII to 108% in 1946 and then dropped gradually in the following two decades to about 30% again at the end of 1960s. I find that the dramatic increase in the marginal income tax rate was an important cause of the postwar baby boom in the US because it lowered the after-tax wage and thus the opportunity cost of child-rearing. I also find that the differential change in taxes by income was an important reason why the baby boom was more pronounced among richer households (as documented by Jones and Tertilt, 2008). Furthermore, I argue that the government's debt policy may also matter for understanding fertility choices because government debt implies a tax burden on children in the future and thus affects their utility, which is a key determinant of current fertility choice in the Barro–Becker model. The results of a computational experiment show that the US government's postwar debt policy also contributed to the baby boom, but its quantitative importance is relatively small.     

Foreign Debt,Foreign Direct Investment and Volatility

We investigate how foreign debt and foreign direct investment (FDI) affect the growth and welfare of a stochastically growing small open economy. First, we find that foreign debt influences the growth of domestic wealth by lowering the cost of capital, while FDI affects the country's welfare by providing an additional source of permanent income. Second, a decline in domestic investment may improve domestic welfare as FDI replaces the gap. Even when the welfare deteriorates, its magnitude is mitigated, leaving more room for discretionary fiscal policy. Third, a fiscal policy aimed to stabilize domestic output fluctuations needs to be conducted not to crowd out the welfare benefit of FDI too much. Fourth, an economy with both types of foreign capital experiences wider welfare swings by external volatility shocks than the one with foreign debt alone, while the welfare effects from domestic volatility shocks are mitigated. The welfare effects of fiscal shocks are much smaller with both types of foreign capital. Lastly, the first-best labor income tax covers the government absorption by the labor's share of total output, and the capital income tax covers the rest. Investment is penalized or subsidized depending on the social marginal cost-gain differential.     

Intergenerational conflict and public sector size and structure: A rationale for debt limits?

How do budget rules influence the size and structure of the public sector? This question is considered in an overlapping generations political economy model. The different horizons of agents influence their voting behaviour and lead to excessive deficit financing and debt accumulation, reducing welfare of all subsequent generations. Along an equilibrium trajectory with increasing debt, the tax burden increases and public sector activities are crowded out due to the increasing costs of debt servicing. A debt ceiling may halt this process leading to less debt, more public consumption and higher welfare.     

Countercyclical taxes in a monopolistically competitive environment

In the context of a neoclassical growth model with monopolistic competition, this paper studies the stabilizing effects of countercyclical tax policy when the income tax rate has an additional role of financing government budget deficits. Consistent with the conventional wisdom, countercyclical taxes generally reduce aggregate volatility, unless the fiscal response to debt accumulation is weak. The presence of monopoly power enhances these effects. Even when automatic stabilizers successfully stabilize business cycle fluctuations, countercyclical taxes are welfare inferior, due to reduced precautionary saving motives. While, if the fiscal response to debt is weak and countercyclical tax policy destabilizing, the increased precautionary saving motive is not welfare enhancing as the asset accumulated is government debt rather than capital. These results are generally robust. Nominal inertia may, however, dominate the precautionary saving mechanism.     

The composition of capital inflows when emerging market firms face financing constraints

The composition of capital inflows to emerging market economies tends to follow a predictable dynamic pattern across the business cycle. In most emerging market economies, total inflows are pro-cyclical, with debt and portfolio equity flowing in first, followed later in the expansion by foreign direct investment (FDI). To understand the dynamic composition of these flows, we use a small open economy (SOE) framework to model the composition of capital inflows as the equilibrium outcome of emerging market firms' financing decisions. We show how costly external financing and FDI search costs generate a state contingent cost of financing such that the cheapest source of financing depends on the phase of the business cycle. In this manner, the financial frictions are able to explain the interaction between the types of flows and deliver a time-varying composition of flows, as well as other standard features of emerging market business cycles. If, as this work suggests, flows are an equilibrium outcome of firms' financing decisions, then volatility of capital inflows is not necessarily bad for an economy. Furthermore, using capital controls to shut down one type of flow and encourage another is certain to have both short- and long-run welfare implications.     

Financing R&D in Chinese private firms: Business associations or political connection?

Using a new and unique dataset of Chinese private firms, this paper explores how private firms access bank loans to finance innovative activities. The results reveal that political connection, rather than membership in a government-controlled business association, largely determines private firms' innovations by providing access to bank loans. Furthermore, the “grease-the-wheels” mechanism of political connection is stronger if the firms are more constrained financially, located in regions with low levels of financial development, or located in regions with relatively under-developed institutional environments. Finally, cash flow, used to measure internal financing, and trade credit, used to measure informal financing, are important alternative financing channels and support firms' R&D investments. Our paper implies that China's government needs to continue fostering a good financing environment and supporting innovation activities.     

Tax Havens,Growth, and Welfare

This paper develops an endogenous growth model featuring tax havens, and uses it to examine how the existence of tax havens affects the economic growth rate and social welfare in high‐tax countries. We show that the presence of tax havens generates two conflicting channels in determining the growth effect. First, the public investment effect states that tax havens may erode tax revenues and in turn decrease the government's infrastructure expenditure, thereby reducing growth. Second, the tax planning effect of tax havens reduces marginal cost of capital and hence encourages capital accumulation so as to spur economic growth. The overall growth effect is ambiguous and is determined by the extent of these two effects. The welfare analysis shows that tax havens are more likely to be welfare‐enhancing if the government expenditure share in production is low, or the initial income tax rate is high. Moreover, the welfare‐maximizing income tax rate is lower than the growth‐maximizing income tax rate if tax havens are present.     

Corporate Tax Incentives for R&D Investment in OECD Countries

Differentiating internal equity from debt finance, this study examines the generosity of R&D-specific tax incentives in OECD countries based on an NPV model. The corporate tax system generally favours debt finance and some previous findings on the possible preponderance of internal equity for financing R&D investment cannot be explained in relation to R&D-specific tax concessions. The OECD comparison demonstrates that R&D tax allowances adopted in the Czech Republic, Belgium, the UK, Denmark, Hungary, Austria and Australia generated the most substantial tax savings in 2006. Combined with such incentives, the after-tax NPV increases with the corporate tax rate, suggesting stronger investment stimulation through a tax-rate-increase-cum-base-broadening policy.     

State-Federal Resource Tax Rivalry: The Queensland Railway and the Federal Export Tax*

This paper presents a stylized account and analysis of the implications of the intergovernmental tax rivalry which arises between the Queensland and Federal governments in their efforts to tax resource rents. In particular, coal is taxed explicitly through the Federal export levy and implicitly through the Queensland railways ‘excess rail freight’. A game-theoretic environment thus arises. It is shown that if each government sets its tax rate optimally in reaction to the other government's tax polity, then less revenue is generated at a higher deadweight cost. The optimal cooperative solution is compared to the non-cooperative equilibrium and the resulting welfare gains are identified.     

Firms' financial choices and thin capitalization rules under corporate tax competition

Thin capitalization rules have become an important element in the corporate tax systems of developed countries. This paper sets up a model where national and multinational firms choose tax-efficient financial structures and countries compete for multinational firms through statutory tax rates and thin capitalization rules that limit the tax-deductibility of internal debt flows. In a symmetric tax competition equilibrium, each country chooses inefficiently low tax rates and inefficiently lax thin capitalization rules. We show that a coordinated tightening of thin capitalization rules benefits both countries, even though it intensifies competition via tax rates. When countries differ in size, the smaller country not only chooses the lower tax rate but also the more lenient thin capitalization rule.     

Financial crises and the evolution of credit reallocation: Evidence from Korea

This paper examines the evolution of credit reallocation from a geographical location perspective using data from Korean non-financial firms 1984 to 2013. Employing a Bayesian dynamic latent factor model, I decompose local credit reallocation rates into national, region-specific, and idiosyncratic allocation components. This paper uncovers evidence that the national factor, which explains the movement of credit reallocation across 14 administrative districts, intensified after the 1997 financial crisis and played a major role in driving local credit reallocation rates. Furthermore, district-specific factors, which exhibit heterogeneous patterns across districts, also account for a significant portion of credit reallocation fluctuations, which is attributable to districts' heterogeneous geographical properties and dominant industries. Importantly, district-specific factors are the main driver for reallocation dynamics for small firms, suggesting that small firms' financing is more affected by local financial market conditions, whereas the national factor explains more of large firms' debt financing.