Improving Mineral Taxation Policy in Australia*

Australian State governments have begun to increase royalty rates and other mineral taxes. The most instructive approach to taxation policy for the minerals sector is to set up a general model of mines which year the optimal structure of taxes. A model of mine production under uncertainty is presented. The optimal tax is a single tax with two parts. a bonus bid and conditional tax payments based on the ex-post rent of the mine. The actual structure of taxes levied by State and Commonwealth governments is seen to be distinctly sub-optimal in several respects. Proposals to move the actual to word the optimal structure are made, recognizing some of the constraints on information and the maximum acceptable rate of tax reform .     

Taxation and Wage Bargaining*

The paper analyzes the effects of personal taxes on wage bargaining It concludes that an increase in tax progressivity will normally increase union wage-bargaining pressure and so raise the equilibrium wage This is the opposite result to that recently derived by Creedy and McDonald (1990).     

Intergenerational Allocation of Government Expenditures: Externalities and Optimal Taxation

This paper studies optimal capital and labor income taxes when the benefits of public goods are age‐dependent. Provided the government can impose a consumption tax, it can attain the first‐best resource allocation. This involves the uniform taxation of the cohorts' labor income and a zero capital income tax. With no consumption tax and optimally chosen government spending, labor income should be taxed nonuniformly across cohorts and the capital income tax should be nonzero. Deviations of the public goods from their respective optima create distortions. These affect the labor supply decisions of both cohorts and capital accumulation, providing a further reason to tax (or subsidize) capital income.     

Taxation and Life Insurance: A Theoretical Analysis*

Taxation of life insurance is generally considered to pose special and complex problems. These are alleged to stem from the special nature of life insurance. This paper challenges the notion that there is anything inherently special about the economics of life insurance and disputes the claim that it warrants special tax treatment. A model of the life insurance firm is presented and the appropriate basis for taxing life insurance companies and their policyholders is derived. This is compared with the system of taxation currently operating in Australia.     

建立和完善应对自然灾害的财税政策

我国是世界上发生自然灾害较多的国家之一,但防灾的财税政策体系还不尽完善。因此,建立和完善应对自然灾害的财税政策,发挥财税政策在防灾救灾中的作用十分必要。     

Reconsidering the Marginal Welfare Cost of Taxation*

A model with sticky wage rates and involuntary unemployment is used to compute the marginal cost of taxation, and these estimates are compared with those obtained from the conventional price-clearing equilibrium model. Important determinants of the marginal cost estimates are the response of sticky wages to a tax increase, the elasticity of demand for labour, and the unemployment gap. By contrast, the conventional model focuses on the elasticity of labour supply. The different models have different implications for efficient tax design. However, the new model generally agrees with the conventional model regarding significant efficiency costs of higher taxation.     

Fertility,Taxation and Family Policy*

Historically, there is clear evidence of an inverse relationship between female labour supply and fertility. However, the relationship across countries is now positive. Countries like Germany and Italy, with the lowest fertility, also have the lowest female participation rates. This paper analyses the extent to which this can be explained by public policy, in particular taxation and the system of child support. The results suggest that countries which have individual rather than joint taxation, and which support families through child care facilities rather than child payments, are likely to have both higher female labour supply and higher fertility.     

Labor Taxation and Foreign Direct Investment*

In this paper, we analyze the implications of the effective taxation of labor for profits and, hence, the decisions made by multinational enterprises concerning the location of their headquarters. If a higher employee‐borne tax burden reduces manager effort, it should also negatively affect firm profits and the location of the headquarters. We compile data on personal income tax profiles for 52 economies and the year 2002 at different moments of the distribution of gross wages. Our findings suggest that higher employee‐borne labor taxes are less conducive to the location of headquarters and foreign direct investment stocks in a given host economy.     

Measuring Welfare Changes and the Excess Burden of Taxation*

This paper examines methods used to evaluate the welfare effects of tax changes, with emphasis on the measurement problems involved. Welfare changes and excess burdens are defined, along with approximations. Aggregate measures, using a social welfare function, are examined. The special case of income taxation is then examined, leading to discussion of the marginal welfare cost of taxation and the marginal cost of funds. The measurement methods examined include the use and estimation of direct and indirect utility functions, along with the algebraic and numerical integration from estimated Marshallian demand functions to the compensated demands. The use of equivalent incomes to examine tax changes, using unit record data from household budget surveys, is then discussed.     

Optimal Taxation of Risky Human Capital*

In a two‐period life‐cycle model with ex ante homogeneous households, earnings risk, and a general earnings function, we derive the optimal linear labor tax rate and optimal linear education subsidies. The optimal income tax trades off social insurance against incentives to work. Education subsidies are not used for social insurance, but they are only targeted at offsetting the distortions of the labor tax and internalizing a fiscal externality. Both optimal education subsidies and tax rates increase if labor and education are more complementary, because education subsidies indirectly lower labor tax distortions by stimulating labor supply. Optimal education subsidies (taxes) also correct non‐tax distortions arising from missing insurance markets. Education subsidies internalize a positive (negative) fiscal externality if there is underinvestment (overinvestment) in education because of risk. Education policy unambiguously allows for more social insurance if education is a risky activity. However, if education hedges against labor‐market risk, optimal tax rates could be lower than in the case without education subsidies.     

Progressive Taxation and the Life-Cycle Model: An Application of the Theory of Firm*

In the presence of a progressive consumption (wage income) lax the marginal cost of consumption (leisure) is rising and* the life-cycle allocation problem of an individual is presentable in the framework of a monopsony. Although the progressive taxes do not in general alter the qualitative nature of standard results on life-cycle theory, their quantitative implications are serious. In contrast to the equivalence between proportional consumption and wage income taxes, the effects of the two progressive taxes on the life-cycle consumption and labour supply allocation decision are not only different but in most cases also in opposite directions.     

Income Taxation and the Diversity of Consumer Goods: A Political Economy Approach*

After‐tax income inequality has risen since the mid‐1990s, as increases in market income inequality have not been offset by greater fiscal redistribution. We argue that the substantial increase in the diversity of consumer goods has mitigated mounting political pressures for redistribution. Within a probabilistic voting framework, we demonstrate that if the share of diversified goods in the consumption bundle increases sufficiently with income, then an increase in goods diversity can reduce the political equilibrium tax rate. Focusing on OECD countries, we find empirical support for both the model's micro‐political foundations and the implied relation between goods diversity and fiscal policy outcomes.     

Optimal Taxation of International Income Flows*

Double taxation of international income flows has been regarded as undesirable and international tax agreements have been negotiated to avoid it. The questions asked are whether double taxation is appropriate and whether cooperation is required to reach the optimal solution. The results are that generally some double taxation is desirable, as long as taxes are applied at the appropriate rates, and that an efficient solution can be attained in the absence of explicit cooperation using a deduction rule, instead of the now commonly used credit rule. A rationale for the current system of tax agreements and their emphasis of the credit rule is discussed.     

Optimal Redistributive Income Taxation and Efficiency Wages*

In this paper, we integrate efficiency wage setting with the theory of optimal redistributive income taxation. In doing so, we use a model with two skill types, where efficiency wage setting characterizes the labor market faced by the low‐skilled, whereas the high‐skilled face a conventional, competitive labor market. We show that the marginal income tax implemented for the high‐skilled is negative under plausible assumptions. The marginal income tax facing the low‐skilled can be either positive or negative, in general. An increase in unemployment benefits contributes to a relaxation of the binding self‐selection constraint, which makes this instrument particularly useful from the perspective of redistribution.