International and Intergenerational Environmental Externalities

We examine a world in which policymakers' actions in a given country at a given time have long-lived effects on a common resource: the global environment. We consider the first best in which long-lived planners behave cooperatively, then examine the allocation of resources when there is non-cooperation across countries, across time, or both. Finally we analyze the dynamic behavior of the economy along balanced growth paths. It is found that while long-lived international institutions are necessary to internalize all externalities, cooperation at a point in time may be harmful to future generations.     

Wealth Distribution and Optimal Inheritance Taxation in Life-cycle Economies with Intergenerational Transfers

Intergenerational transfers are introduced into a general equilibrium life-cycle model in order to explain observed levels of wealth heterogeneity. In our overlapping generations model, heterogenous agents face uncertain lifetime and leave both accidental and voluntary bequests to their children. Furthermore, agents face stochastic employment opportunities. The model is calibrated with regard to the characteristics of the US economy. Our results indicate that bequests only account for a small proportion of observed wealth heterogeneity. The introduction of an inheritance tax increases both welfare, as measured by the average lifetime utility of a newborn, and equality of the wealth distribution.
JEL classification : D 31; D 91; H 21; C 68; E 21     

Specific versus ad valorem Taxation and Externalities

Received December 15, 2000; revised version received September 10, 2001     

Productive Government Expenditures and the Current Account

This paper examines the effects of a change in government expenditure on the current account of the balance of payments using the optimizing approach. It is assumed that government expenditure is productive, and is regarded as an input in the aggregate production function. Based on the Blanchard–Fischer-type model, the paper demonstrates decisively that the current account deficit is due to a permanent increase in government expenditure.
JEL Classification Numbers: F41, H30.     

Optimal Indirect and Capital Taxation

We consider an environment in which agents' skills are private information and follow arbitrary stochastic processes. We prove that it is typically Pareto optimal for an individual's marginal benefit of investing in capital to exceed his marginal cost of doing so. This wedge is consistent with a positive tax on capital income. We also prove that it is Pareto optimal for the marginal rate of substitution between any two consumption goods to equal the marginal rate of transformation. This lack of a wedge is consistent with uniform taxation of consumption goods within a period.     

财产课税与地方财政--一个以税收归宿为视角的解释

财产税是世界各国地方政府收入中的重要来源。本文从分析财产税的归宿入手，寻找能够解释这一普遍现象的答案。对绝对税收归宿、平衡预算归宿和差别税收归宿的考察结果表明，作为一种区域内受益税，财产税符合不同级次政府应提供使其辖区范围内居民受益的服务并因此而课税的经济学原理。加快推进财产税改革将有利于规范中国目前的财政体制，改善地方财政所面临的被动局面．     

Optimal Utilitarian Taxation and Horizontal Equity

We impose a horizontal equity restriction on the problem of finding the optimal utilitarian tax mix. The horizontal equity constraint requires that individuals with the same ability have to pay the same amount of taxes regardless of their preferences for leisure. Contrary to normal findings, we find that a good that is complementary to leisure can be encouraged by the tax system and that a good that normally should be discouraged by the tax system can be subsidized even if the economy is composed of only two private commodities plus leisure. Also, the marginal effective tax rate can be different from zero at the top of the ability distribution when the tax mix obeys the horizontal equity constraint.     

Black Markets and Optimal Evadable Taxation

In a simple model of evadable indirect taxation, some surprises emerge. Because of a 'market-thinning' effect of high prices, high taxes induce multiple equilibria (low-price black markets and high-price legal markets). Further, evadability introduces a bifurcation to optimal taxation: For less effective tax administrations, the optimal tax system follows a 'cash cow' pattern, with one sector bearing all of the tax; but for relatively effective administrations, the optimum follows a slightly modified Ramsey rule. This discontinuity results from the mathematics of evasion incentives, and may help explain tax reforms commonly seen over the course of economic development     

Green Technology and Optimal Emissions Taxation

Unless an active environmental policy exists, firms have no incentive to engage in abatement or environmental R&D so policy design is of paramount importance. This design heavily depends on the way R&D spillovers operate. There are two distinct types of R&D spillover: output spillover and input spillover. An input spillover operates on the expenditure toward pollution reduction, whereas an output spillover manifests as the achieved abatement. Under optimal emissions taxation, significant differences arise due to this distinction, in particular, when the spillover operates on R&D inputs. In an oligopolistic setting, the result is higher R&D expenditure, but also higher aggregate emissions and, consequently, higher emissions taxes. By contrast, when spillovers occur in R&D output, there is a U‐shaped relationship between the optimal tax and the spillover, showing a trade‐off between the optimal tax rate and spillovers when these are low. In terms of the relative effectiveness of different R&D organization setups, combining emissions taxes with R&D cooperation, this paper shows that under low levels of R&D spillover R&D cooperation gives higher emissions reductions, whereas when spillovers are high this is not the case.     

政府教育支出区域间不平衡的动态分析

本文认为 ,在对区域间政府教育支出发展不均衡的问题进行研究时 ,还要着重考虑两个方面 ,一是政府教育支出要受到政府财政规模的限制 ,二是政府教育支出要受制于国家教育政策的长期目标。本文从我国近年来总体的政府教育支出规模增长与教育需求的特点着手 ,用动态分析方法对近年来省区间政府教育支出规模变动所引起的受教育人口水平的变化过程进行了分析。文章认为 ,政府应先行调整经济发达地区的教育政策目标 ,继续加大对经济不发达地区的转移支付力度。同时 ,优化教育支出结构 ,提高政府教育支出效率 ,确保有限的政府教育资金都能用在教育事业发展上。     

宪政:现代税制之纲

宪法是税收法律之源，是反映人民共同意志的民主立法，也是保障纳税人利益不受侵犯的自由之法，宪政的基本精神和基本制度构架是决定我国未来税制改革方向的根本性因素；宪法所伸张的正义、平等、人权等价值观，在各种税收专门法中必须得到充分和准确的体现。确立保障生存权、有支付能力、公平税负、量力负担和便利等符合宪法原理的税收原则或总政策，是现代法治社会的基本要求和特征。现代税收应是从纳税者的权利与义务相统一的角度构造的概念，即作为法律上的权利与义务主体的纳税人，以履行纳税义务作为享有宪法规定的各项权利为前提，依照遵从宪法所制定的税收法律为依据，承担物质性的给付义务，从而使国家得以具备满足公民对公共服务需要的能力的活动。     

Government Expenditures and Revenues: Evidence of Fractional Cointegration in an Asymmetric Modeling

In this paper, we examine the relationship between the US government expenditures and revenues using a fractional cointegration framework. In doing so, we permit a much richer degree of flexibility in the dynamic adjustment process toward equilibrium than in the classical case of cointegration. Moreover, we relax the assumption of a symmetric adjustment process throughout the use of threshold autoregressive (TAR) and momentum threshold autoregressive (M-TAR) models in the error correction representation of the process. The results show that both individual series are non-stationary I(1) and we do not find evidence of cointegration of any degree. However, if we take into account a structural break at 1973(2), fractional cointegration is found if the underlying process is autocorrelated, especially in the asymmetric modeling.

Optimal Management of Environmental Externalities with Time Lags and Uncertainty

Many environmental externalities occur with time lags that can range from a few days to several centuries in length, and many of these externalities are also subject to uncertainty. In this paper, we examine the key features of an optimal policy to manage environmental externalities that are both lagged and stochastic. We develop a two-period, two-polluter model and obtain closed-form solutions for optimal emissions levels under different combinations of damage functions and stochastic processes. These solutions show that it is not obvious whether greater control should be exerted on polluters that generate externalities with longer lags or on polluters that generate externalities with shorter lags. We find that the optimal ranking of polluters with respect to the length of the time lag associated with their externality will depend on (a) the discount rate, (b) conditional expectations of future states of the polluted resource, (c) persistence of the pollutant, and (d) initial conditions.     

动态环境税外部性、污染累积路径与长期经济增长——兼论环境税的开征时点选择问题

本文构建了包含动态环境税、污染累积与经济增长的理论模型,采用Shooting方法计算鞍点路径上各个时期的均衡解,分析了动态环境税的外部效应,主要结论为:渐进递增的动态环境税政策通过对能源过度使用的纠正,不但体现了促进经济增长与降低污染水平的双重红利,而且实现了整条鞍点路径上福利最大化的目标。与之相对,不征收环境税时,能源过度消耗不能得到有效抑制,环境污染产生了较高的生产效率损失与社会福利损失。严格环境税政策对于经济增长依赖能源的行为则存在"矫枉过正",进而出现消费过度的问题,由于投资不足迅速造成产出增长乏力,并使得鞍点路径上社会福利长期处于较低水平。此外,通过设定政府的优化目标函数对动态环境税最佳开征时点的研究表明,政府应尽早开征环境税,以及时减弱经济增长对能源的过度依赖性,实现经济科学发展与社会福利不断改善。     

Optimal Taxation of Elderly Care Services

This paper explores optimal taxation of market purchases of an elderly care service, which can also be produced in the home. Home production cannot be taxed. If children discount parents' utility relative to their own utilities, an intergenerational externality arises in the family. When home production of the service is significant, the optimal tax rate on market purchases should be: (i) high , if the service and leisure are complements and the externality is strong, (ii) low , if they are substitutes , irrespective of the degree of the externality.     

Uncertainty, Commitment, and Optimal Taxation

This paper examines the optimal tax design problem in the presence of wage uncertainty. The wage has a continuous distribution, individuals are ex ante identical, preferences are separable in labor supply and goods, public policy aims at providing the population with social insurance, and the only restriction on the tax instruments is that emanating from lack of public observability of realized wages and labor supplies. We show that optimal tax structures depend crucially on whether it is labor supply or goods that consumers have to commit to before the resolution of uncertainty. Specifically, we prove that, in the absence of commitment, the social insurance problem collapses to the traditional optimal tax problem. Second, if labor supply is precommitted, it would be possible to effect a first-best outcome. Third, commitment to goods would make indirect taxation a useful instrument of tax policy even in the presence of a general income tax; it requires differential tax treatment of committed and noncommitted goods. Finally, if preferences are separable between the two types of goods, precommitted goods must be taxed at a uniform rate lower than that on the noncommitted goods.     

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.     

“交易外部性”:外部性的重新理解及系统整合

基于对外部性和交易本质的理解,当前生产外部性和消费外部性两分的观点有失偏颇。研究提出交易外部性概念,即产权交易过程中,交易一方或交易以外的行为主体的权利(束)或权利部分职能被交易另一方强制利用而未被定价或实现对等补偿的现象。据此,按照发生领域和作用主体的不同,外部性可以划分为生产外部性、消费外部性和交易外部性三类,其中,交易外部性进一步包含一类交易外部性、二类交易外部性和三类交易外部性。此处的二类交易外部性与史普博的内部性具有相同的本质内涵,即内部性实质是交易外部性范畴下的一个子分类。     

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.     

对地方政府保障房支出缺口的估计——来自江苏省的证据

估计地方政府保障房实际支出与合理支出之间缺口的大小对于判断政府供给责任以及制定保障房建设规划具有非常重要的意义。为此,本文运用IMF较为齐全的40个国家(地区)2005-2007年的面板数据,估计了地方政府保障房的合理支出值,利用《2009年江苏省住房保障目标任务完成情况表》估算了江苏各市(县)政府保障房的实际支出值,以江苏各市(县)为例测算地方政府保障房支出缺口。估计结果表明,几乎所有地方政府均存在保障房支出的正缺口。经济发展水平居中且受到上级政府监管力度不大的苏中地区政府保障房支出缺口相对较大,苏南和苏北地区缺口相对较小。深化经济体制改革与加大监管力度双管齐下、约束地方政府非公共服务行为,有利于促使保障房的实际支出值等于或者接近合理支出值,从而缩小地方政府的保障房支出缺口。