Taxation in an Overlapping Generations Model with Human Capital

We examine the impact of flat-rate taxes on intergenerational equity in an overlapping generations model of a small open economy, assuming the intergenerational externality of human capital accumulation. The externality may cause the difference between the growth rates in private human capital and in average human capital of the economy. If the externality is sufficiently small, the introduction of an interest income tax will benefit all future generations. In contrast, if it is sufficiently great, the introduction of a wage tax could harm all generations by raising financial asset holdings and thereby reducing consumption.     

The Friedman Rule in a Model with Endogenous Growth and Cash‐in‐Advance Constraint

This paper introduces money into an overlapping‐generations model with endogenous growth. The main message of the paper is that as long as the modified golden rule is attained, the Friedman rule is optimal. The result holds regardless of the ability of the government to internalize the externality and control the level of human capital. Other results include: (i) violation of the Friedman rule for a different second‐best environment wherein human capital accumulation is controlled but not physical capital accumulation and (ii) existence of a negative relationship between money growth rate and the economy’s endogenous growth rate.     

Pollution Externalities in a Model of Endogenous Fertility and Growth

An endogenous growth model with human capital formation, pollution caused by production of consumption goods, and endogenous fertility decisions made by altruistic agents with infinite horizons is presented. Consequences for optimal policy of modelling fertility as an explicit decision variable are examined. Because ordinary lump-sum transfers to individuals are no longer neutral, either revenue from a pollution tax must be redistributed to dynasties (working as an implicit tax on child births), or lump-sum transfers must be supplemented with an explicit fertility tax. Alternatively, the government can avoid distortions of the fertility decisions by maintaining an appropriate public debt. When abatement is highly productive, it can be optimal to subsidize fertility in order to increase total production.     

Endogenous Growth,Skill Obsolescence,and Output Hysteresis in a New Keynesian Model with Unemployment

We embed skill obsolescence and endogenous growth into a New Keynesian model with search-and-matching frictions. The model accounts for key features of the Great Recession: the “productivity puzzle” and the “missing disinflation puzzle.” Lower aggregate demand raises long-term unemployment and the training costs associated with skill obsolescence. Lower aggregate employment hinders learning-by-doing, which slows down human capital accumulation, feeding back into even fewer vacancies than justified by the demand shock alone. These feedback channels mitigate the disinflationary effect of the demand shock while amplifying its contractionary effect on output. The temporary growth slowdown translates into output hysteresis.     

Growth and Welfare Effects of Fiscal Policy in an Endogenous Growth Model with Public Investment

In this paper we analyze growth and welfare effects of fiscal policy in an endogenous growth model along the balanced growth path. As to the model we assume that sustained per capita growth results from public investment. The government uses its tax revenue for investment in public capital, for investment subsidy and for transfer payments. We then analyze how the balanced growth rate reacts to variations in those policy variables. Further, we study welfare effects of varying the fiscal parameters and demonstrate that, in general, maximizing economic growth is not equivalent to maximizing welfare on the balanced growth path.     

Optimal Fiscal Policy with Consumption Taxation

We characterize optimal fiscal policies in a general equilibrium model with monopolistic competition and endogenous public spending. The government can tax consumption, as alternative to labor income taxes. Consumption taxation acts as indirect taxation of profits (intratemporal gains of taxing consumption) and enables the policymaker to manage the burden of public debt more efficiently (intertemporal gains of taxing consumption). We show analytically that these two gains imply that the optimal share of government spending is higher under consumption taxation than with labor income taxation. Then, we quantify numerically each of these gains by calibrating the model on the U.S. economy.     

Habit Formation in an Overlapping Generations Model with Borrowing Constraints

We introduce habit‐formation in the three‐period OLG borrowing‐constrained framework of Constantinides et al. (2002) by allowing the utility of the middle‐aged (old) to depend on consumption when young (middle‐aged). This specification enables us to separate the effect of the two habit parameters (middle‐aged and old) since each representative age‐group can face different levels of habit persistence. The two‐habit setup underlines some important issues with regards to savings and security returns which do not always conform to the standard findings in the literature. In addition, the model produces equity premium consistent with US data for relatively small levels of risk aversion.     

基于公共投资的内生增长：模型与政策

我国公共投资由各级政府部门主导,基于这一实践,文章在经典的拉姆齐-卡斯-库普曼斯模型的基础上,引入政府行政机构的最优化行为,说明在政府主导公共投资的增长方式下公共投资效率对经济增长和福利的影响。研究结果表明,存在一个公共投资效率的梯级,居民福利水平也呈现系列梯级分布,而且公共投资的生产效率梯级越高,居民福利水平梯级也越高。因此,在当前政府主导公共投资的增长方式下,采取有效措施提高公共投资的效率并使其位于关键值之上,这对于居民和政府机构是双赢的举措。     

Predation,Protection, and Accumulation: Endogenous Property Rights in an Overlapping Generations Growth Model

We study a simple growth model with overlapping generations in which property rights are insecure. Insecurity of property rights leads to predation. Due to predation some of the resources are used for protection purposes. Both predation and protection remove resources from the accumulation process. In the model individuals allocate their labor between working for firms and appropriating output from them. Firms allocate their capital between production and protection. Without government, the model generates a unique but inefficient equilibrium. We show that in this equilibrium the level of output is increasing in the rate of effectiveness of protection, the relative utility of honesty, and the discount rate. Further, the equilibrium level of output is dynamically inefficient. We then extend the model to include a government as the sole provider of the public good “protection”. Protection is assumed to be financed by a capital tax imposed on firms. The model then yields multiple equilibria, with both a stable high-protection low-predation equilibrium, and a stable low-protection high-predation equilibrium. Which equilibrium a country is most likely to achieve, and how difficult it is for a country to move to the more desirable low-predation high-protection equilibrium, depend crucially on the parameters of the model describing the economy’s institutional structure. Hence, the results of the model support the emphasis placed by the World Bank on the importance for growth of strengthening institutional structures in developing countries.JEL Code: D23, D90, O41     

Taxation and Income Distribution Dynamics in a Neoclassical Growth Model

We examine how changes in tax policies affect the dynamics of the distributions of wealth and income in a Ramsey model in which agents differ in their initial capital endowments. The endogeneity of the labor supply plays a crucial role, as tax changes that affect hours of work will affect the distribution of wealth and income, reinforcing or offsetting the direct redistributive impact of taxes. We consider different ways of financing government expenditure and find that policies that reduce the labor supply are associated with lower output but also with a more equal distribution of after‐tax income. We illustrate these effects by examining the impact of recent tax changes observed in the United States and in European economies.     

税收与经济增长关系的文献综述

国内外学者对税收如何影响经济增长的问题进行了较多研究,既包括理论研究也包括经验分析,但相关研究并未得出一致的结论。本文分别从国外研究与国内研究两个方面,对相关文献进行梳理和总结,分析税收与经济增长的相关性,进而获取有益的启发,以期对政府制定合理的税收政策提供一定的帮助。     

确定情形下的货币、利率与内生经济增长

通过对消费和资本投入施加预付现金约束,在内生经济增长框架（AK模型）下建立了一个封闭的货币经济体,并构建了以利率为核心的分析框架。研究表明,在确定情形下,利率的改变会影响代理人的消费与投资,并进而对价格和经济总体的消费与投资产生影响,货币当局可以通过利率以间接控制货币供给;当货币供给变化时,经济总体的消费与投资等变量也会发生变化,货币不是中性的;通过比较最优利率政策与Friedman法则,发现两者惟一的区别仅在于最初期利率的不同。     

提高我国消费增长率的制约因素及对策

投资、消费和出口是经济增长的三大动力。但目前我国的经济增长主要是靠投资和出口拉动的,消费对经济增长拉动的效力甚微。因此分析制约国内居民消费增长率的因素,寻找提高消费增长率的途径,提高消费增长率,促进国民经济稳步发展,具有重要的理论和现实意义。     

Global Trends and Issues in Value Added Taxation

Since the late 1960s, the VAT has become one of the mainstays of the tax systems in over one hundred countries. Apparently, its revenue raising and neutrality properties make it an attractive tax in a rapidly integrating, high-tax world. Following an overview of VATs throughout the world, this article examines various VAT structure and policy issues under the following headings: tax coverage features, tax base aspects, hard-to-tax sectors, rate structure issues, and interjurisdictional coordination problems. It is shown that the normative requirements of a good VAT are often met only in the breach.     

Optimal International Taxation and Growth Rate Convergence: Tax Competition vs. Coordination

Optimal international taxation and its implications for convergence in long run income growth rates are analyzed in the context of an endogenously growing world economy with perfect capital mobility. Under tax competition (i) the residence principle will maximize national welfare; (ii) the optimal long run tax rate on capital incomes from various sources will be zero in all countries; and (iii) long term per capita income growth rates will be equalized across countries. Under tax coordination, (i) becomes irrelevant while (ii) and (iii) will continue to hold. In other words, optimal tax policies are growth-equalizing with and without international policy coordination. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Endogenous Fertility and the Design of Family Taxation

The paper innovates on the existing optimal taxation literature by taking fertility as endogenous, and allowing for households to be differentiated by their ability to raise children, as well as by their ability to raise income. In a context where the government cannot observe personal abilities, fertility behaviour conveys a great deal of information about those characteristics, which helps to relax the self-selection constraints on re-distribution. Bi-dimentional household differentiation introduces the possibility that re-distribution will be from households with low utility to households with high utility, and that it may be optimal to accentuate or reverse the sign of laissez-faire utility inequality. Contrary to popular belief, we find that it is not necessarily optimal for the tax system to be so designed that an additional child would lighten the tax burden on his or her parents. If it is, the optimal policy may include an unusual mix of taxes on number of children, subsidies on child-specific commodities, income support for low-wage households, and positive marginal income tax rates for all.     

Monetary Policy in a Schumpeterian Growth Model with Vertical R&D Sectors

We explore the growth and welfare effects of monetary policy in a Schumpeterian economy with cash-in-advance (CIA)-constrained research and development (R&D) investment in both the upstream and downstream sectors. We show that the nominal interest rate can have an inverted-U relation with economic growth due to its effects on labor allocations between manufacturing and R&D and between the R&D sectors. Furthermore, aggregate R&D overinvestment is generally sufficient but not necessary for the Friedman rule of zero nominal interest rates to be suboptimal. Calibrated using data from U.S. manufacturing firms, our model features a positive welfare-maximizing nominal interest rate despite aggregate R&D underinvestment.     

An Efficiency Analysis of Consumption and Production Taxation with an Application to Value-Added Taxation

The usual arguments pro destination-based, consumption-oriented or pro origin-based, production-oriented VAT are found wanting. They largely ignore tax effects on locational choices of firms. This paper provides a comparison of consumption and production taxation within a model of firm and household mobility. It is shown that the case for consumption taxation becomes stronger when profit taxes are not available. The consumption tax is the more targeted instrument when households are to be induced to locate efficiently. It is argued that, with border controls lacking, the alternative option should be seen more in a wage tax and less in a production tax.     

Capital Mobility and Source-Based Taxation of Capital Income in Small Open Economies

This paper examines the taxation of capital income in a small open economy that faces a highly elastic supply of internationally mobile capital and increasing tax competition. The analysis considers a wide variety of additional factors that affect the determination of capital income taxation policy, including the desire to tax economic rents earned by foreign and domestic firms, the desire to take advantage of any treasury transfer effects, the role played by transfer pricing and other financial accounting manipulations by foreign multinationals, the need for a backstop to the personal income tax and various political concerns. The paper evaluates several potential income and consumption-based tax reforms in this context. JEL Code: H21, H25, H87     

应对我国低消费经济现状的税制改革与协调

低消费率和高储蓄率使我国经济蕴藏着较大的隐忧.我国低消费率的形成原因很复杂,刺激消费需要多管齐下.协调当前我国的各项税制改革是提高我国消费率的重要手段.通过调整税基,加强所得税和财产税的地位,减少增值税在我国税收收入中的比重,使我国的税基更多地依赖于所得而不是消费,有利于我国消费率的提高.通过税制改革来改善收入分配状况,提高低收入者的收入水平,也有利于我国消费率的提升.