我国利息税税负累进程度分析——以北京地区为例

税负累进程度是指税收负担随收入数额的增加而提高的程度,它是衡量税收公平的指标.对我国现行利息税税负累进性的分析表明,当前5%的税率下,利息税的税负累进性微弱,20%的税率更能增强利息税的税负累进性.要强化利息税的公平功能,可能的政策途径有:提高利息税税率;设定起征点,采用累进税率;并入个人所得税实行合并征收;加强对利息税收入的二次分配.     

Comparing the top and the bottom income earners: Distribution of income and taxes in the United States

Tax reform is again at the center stage as Congress grapples with ideas to reduce the US budget deficit and the country readies itself for another election year. Given this unusually charged tax reform season, populist and party rhetoric appears to the general population to have largely replaced reasoned debate as politicians, economists and pundits “cherry pick” facts to justify their claims. Our contribution to the current debate on tax equity is that this is one of the very few studies that jointly consider the impact of payroll and income taxes. Most tax equity studies focus only on the federal income tax and as such issue misleading implications. It is important to jointly consider payroll and income taxes because (a) for taxpayers in lower income ranges, the payroll tax burden outweighs the income tax burden, while (b) for higher income taxpayers income from wages above $106,800 ($110,000 in 2012) are payroll-tax free, and (c) other sources of income, namely dividends and capital gains, are not subject to payroll taxes at all. Thus, we provide a more comprehensive picture of the overall progressivity (or lack thereof) exhibited by the current tax laws. In addition, we also consider how some often-raised tax proposals would prospectively affect income inequality and tax progressivity.     

平均税率、标准税率与收入分布对个人所得税累进性的影响

运用中间累进性指标将个人所得税累进性的变化分解为标准税率的影响及收入分布的影响,对再分配效应变化也做了类似的分解,实证分析了我国2005~2011年个人所得税累进性及再分配效应的变化。结果显示,收入分布改变对于累进性的变化发挥主导作用,平均税率对于再分配效应的变化非常关键。因此,个人所得税的改革首先需要在分析居民收入分布的基础上进行,另外在累进性提高的同时也需十分关注税收规模的变化。     

The effects of standardized tax rates,average tax rates,and the distribution of income on tax progressivity

This study examines the changes in US individual income tax progressivity over the 1986–2003 period using the indexes developed by [Kakwani, N.C., 1976. Measurement of tax progressivity: An international comparison. Economic Journal 87(March), 71–80]. Although progressivity over this time frame has generally been studied in the literature, we provide additional insights by decomposing the changes in index values to account for the effects of concurrent changes in the standardized tax rates, average tax rates, and the income distribution. The decomposition should prove to be particularly useful when different summary indexes lead to conflicting conclusions about progressivity changes, as is often the case. From a policy standpoint, we show that it is the standardized tax rates, a derivative of the legislated tax rates, which need to be monitored and managed to offset the negative progressivity effects of increasing before-tax income inequality.     

Progressive taxes and firm births

Tax reform proposals in the spirit of the “flat tax” model typically aim to reduce three parameters: the average tax burden, the progressivity of the tax schedule, and the complexity of the tax code. We explore the implications of changes in these parameters for entrepreneurial activity, measured by counts of firm births. The Swiss fiscal system offers sufficient intra-national variation in tax codes to allow us to estimate such effects with considerable precision. We find that high average taxes and complicated tax codes depress firm birth rates, while tax progressivity per se promotes firm births. The latter result supports the existence of an insurance effect from progressive corporate income taxes for risk-averse entrepreneurs. However, implied elasticities with respect to the level and complexity of corporate taxes are an order of magnitude larger than elasticities with respect to the progressivity of tax schedules.     

Reduced Tax Progressivity in Norway in the Nineties: The Effect from Tax Changes

The inequality in pre-tax income increased in Norway in the 1990s, while the concentration of taxes remained largely unaltered. This means that tax progressivity has decreased in the period, as measured by summary indices of tax progressivity. In this paper I analyze individual income data to ascertain whether tax changes in the period can explain the observed decrease in tax progressivity. As marginal tax rates at high income levels have been substantially reduced in the period, for instance through the tax reform of 1992, it is expected that tax changes may have influenced the degree of inequality in pre-tax incomes. This behavioral effect is examined by deriving estimates of the elasticity of gross income with respect to the net-of-tax rate, obtained from various panel data regressions. The tax changes may also have shifted the distributional burden of taxes for unaltered level of pre-tax income inequality. In order to identify this (direct) effect of tax-law alterations, the same fixed distribution of pre-tax income is exposed to various tax-laws in the period.     

What Makes the Personal Income Tax Progressive? A Comparative Analysis for Fifteen OECD Countries

In this paper, we explore the roles of tax credits, rate structures, allowances and deductions in determining the overall progressivity of net income tax liabilities in fifteen OECD countries. Three clusters emerge: (i) the rate-structure countries, Australia, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain, where the rate effect is the dominant (but not the only) source of progressivity of gross and net tax liabilities; (ii) the allowance countries, the English-speaking countries other than Australia, where allowances are the dominant source of progressivity; and (iii) the mixed structure countries, Belgium, Finland, Germany and Sweden, where roughly half of the progressivity of gross tax liabilities is attributable to the rate structure.     

Effects of Progressive Taxes under Decentralized Bargaining and Heterogeneous Labor

We consider changes in income tax progressivity in an economy where workers' productivities differ and workers and firms bargain individually over wages. With given employment a pure increase in tax progressivity reduces wages by reducing workers' relative bargaining power. When average taxes also increase, after-tax wages are unambiguously reduced, while the effects on gross wages and firm profitability are ambiguous. We next endogenize employment and firm entry under a uniform worker productivity distribution and the government's only policy instrument is a linear income tax. While a first-best solution then is ruled out, a second-best solution can be implemented using a family of linear tax functions, where a more progressive tax implies a higher tax revenue to the government. We show that the government can increase its tax revenue, and reduce after-tax income differences, without any additional disturbance to allocation.     

“十四五”时期的个人所得税改革展望

个人所得税在调节收入分配、实现社会公平方面具有重要作用。“十四五”时期的改革部署中明确提出了健全直接税体系,提高直接税比重的要求。因此,“十四五”时期个人所得税改革的重点在于提高个人所得税收入占税收总收入的比重,同时实现税收公平目标。对比近两年国外个人所得税发展趋势,发现我国个人所得税存在收入占比较低、劳动所得税负较重等问题。可以从多方面入手解决问题。一是将资本所得纳入综合所得计税范围,同时推进现代化税收征管,避免税收流失,以提高个人所得税收入占税收总收入的比重。二是通过完善专项附加扣除政策,进一步降低中低收入群体的税收负担,实现税收公平。三是优化高端人才税收优惠政策,提高人力资本积累对高质量发展的贡献。     

Effective labor taxation and the international location of headquarters

Profit taxes are widely acknowledged to influence the location of firms’ headquarters. This paper sheds light on the role of aspects of labor taxation for the international location of headquarters. While profit taxes can be avoided in various ways, it is much harder for firms to manipulate the firm-specific labor tax base so that labor taxes may be relatively important for firm location. We construct a unique data set of effective labor taxes in 120 countries and use data on the location of 35,206 firms to analyze the impact of labor income tax rates, the progressivity of the income tax schedule, and social security contributions on firms’ decisions where to locate their headquarters. The findings suggest that both a higher progressivity of the tax system and higher (employee- and employer-borne) social security contributions negatively influence a country’s attractiveness for headquarters location. Hence, a one percentage point increase in these payroll taxes, reduces the probability of a country to attract headquarters by 6.1 %. The results prove robust in various empirical model specifications and subsets of the data.     

Unequal inequalities: Do progressive taxes reduce income inequality?

This paper analyzes the effect of changes in the structural progressivity of national income tax systems on observed and actual income inequality. Using several unique measures of progressivity over the 1981–2005 period for a large panel of countries, we find that progressivity reduces inequality in observed income, but has a significantly smaller impact on actual inequality, approximated by consumption-based Ginis. An empirical comparative analysis shows that the differential effect on observed versus actual inequality is much larger in countries with weaker legal institutions. We also find that structural progressivity has a greater equalizing effect in environments that support pro-poor redistribution. Substantial differences in inequality response to changes in top versus bottom rates are also uncovered.     

TAX PROGRESSIVITY AND CORPORATE INCENTIVES TO HEDGE

If a company faces some form of tax progressivity—that is, its marginal tax rate increases over the firm's expected range of reported taxable income—corporate hedging can reduce the firm's expected tax liability by reducing the volatility of pre-tax income. In a study described in this article, the authors used simulation methods to investigate the extent to which tax progressivity arises from various provisions of the tax code, such as the AMT and tax carryforwards and carrybacks. Based on their analysis of over 80,000 COMPUSTAT firm-year observations, the authors find that, in about 50% of the cases, corporations face effective tax functions that exhibit progressivity. The other 50% of cases are about evenly divided between firms that are tax neutral and those facing tax schedules that are "regressive" (again, over the relevant range of expected reported income).
For those companies facing progressive tax functions, the authors estimate that the projected average tax savings from a 5% reduction in the volatility of taxable income is about 5.4% of the expected tax liabilities. However, the distribution of expected reductions is highly skewed, in extreme cases exceeding 40% of the total tax liability. Most of these extreme cases are small to medium-sized companies, since such firms are much more likely to meet the two conditions for achieving large tax benefits: (1) expected pretax income that is close to zero; and (2) sufficiently volatile income that the firm (in the absence of hedging) expects to report losses in some years. In sum, small to medium-sized companies experience the greatest tax benefits from hedging.     

2000～2008年OECD成员国个人所得税变化及对我国的启示

本文通过对2000～2008年OECD成员国个人所得税变化的分析,得出OECD成员国低收入纳税人税负下降、高收入纳税人税负上升,个人所得税最高边际税率普遍下降、税率档次进一步减少、税收累进性提高等结论。借鉴OECD成员国经验并结合我国国情,认为我国个人所得税的功能应定位于调节收入分配,并就如何提高我国个人所得税累进性提出了相关政策建议。     

The Distributional Implications of Income Under‐Reporting in Hungary*

The ability and inclination of specific social groups to evade tax vary widely, and this leads to considerable variation in the actual tax burden on individuals with similar levels of income. Thus, ignoring tax evasion can be seriously misleading in terms of the distributive and fiscal effects of the tax system. This paper estimates the distributional implications of income tax evasion in Hungary, based on a random sample of the administrative tax records of nearly 230,000 individuals. Gross incomes declared in the administrative tax returns are compared with incomes stated in a nationally representative household budget survey. Our estimates show that the average rate of underreporting is 9–13 per cent, though this conceals a big difference between the self‐employed (who hide the greater part of their income) and employees. The estimates are likely to be lower bounds. These rates are used in a tax– benefit microsimulation model to calculate the fiscal and distributional implications of under‐reporting. Tax evasion reduces households' personal income tax payments by about 16–20 per cent. While the poverty rate increases only slightly, income inequality rises significantly, suggesting that high‐income households tend to evade tax proportionately more. Finally, we find that tax evasion largely reduces the progressivity of the tax system.     

On the optimal progressivity of the income tax code

This paper computes the optimal progressivity of the income tax code in a dynamic general equilibrium model with household heterogeneity in which uninsurable labor productivity risk gives rise to a nontrivial income and wealth distribution. A progressive tax system serves as a partial substitute for missing insurance markets and enhances an equal distribution of economic welfare. These beneficial effects of a progressive tax system have to be traded off against the efficiency loss arising from distorting endogenous labor supply and capital accumulation decisions.Using a utilitarian steady state social welfare criterion we find that the optimal US income tax is well approximated by a flat tax rate of 17.2% and a fixed deduction of about $9,400. The steady state welfare gains from a fundamental tax reform towards this tax system are equivalent to 1.7% higher consumption in each state of the world. An explicit computation of the transition path induced by a reform of the current towards the optimal tax system indicates that a majority of the population currently alive (roughly 62%) would experience welfare gains, suggesting that such fundamental income tax reform is not only desirable, but may also be politically feasible.     

Beyond the labour income tax wedge: the unemployment-reducing effect of tax progressivity

In this paper, we argue that, for a given overall level of labour income taxation, a more progressive tax schedule increases employment. From a theoretical point of view, higher progressivity increases overall employment through a wage moderating effect and also because employment of low-paid workers is more elastic to wages. We test these theoretical predictions on a panel of 21 OECD countries over 1998–2008. Controlling for the burden of taxation at the average wage, our estimates suggest that a more progressive tax schedule reduces the unemployment rate and increases the employment rate. These findings are confirmed when we account for the potential endogeneity of both average taxation and progressivity. Overall, our results suggest that policy-makers should not only focus on the detrimental effects of tax progressivity on in-work effort, but also consider the employment-enhancing effects.     

浅析我国税收制度对国民储蓄倾向的影响

税收与国民储蓄间的关系表现在税收对储蓄的动员性上。所得税和财产税抑制储蓄,商品税则有可能相对提高国民储蓄倾向。当前,我国受税制安排的特殊性、收入分配的非公平性及特殊国情的影响,税收制度与国民储蓄间的关系具有某种特性。这种特性表明,在我国税制改革中税制的设计既要保证国民储蓄的合理增长,又要兼顾公平,从而使我国国民经济在适度储蓄规模的基础上得以健康协调发展。     

Does tax convexity matter for risk? A dynamic study of tax asymmetry and equity beta

The purpose of this study is to explore the effect of tax convexity on firms’ market risk, where tax convexity measures the progressivity of firms’ tax function. We examine the relation between equity beta and tax convexity based on a standard contingent-claims model, in which firms face nonlinear tax schedules. We verify that in the presence of default and growth options, the effect of tax convexity on beta is significant and depends on several countervailing forces. Tax convexity has a direct, positive effect on beta, as well as two indirect countereffects through default and growth options. The overall effect is ambiguous and quantitatively significant. As asymmetric tax schedules are used in most countries, assuming a linear tax schedule in the valuation framework may misestimate beta and thus fail to assess risk accurately. Our theoretical model shows that tax convexity should be taken into consideration when estimating equity beta.     

Housing policy and the progressivity of income taxation

Most countries have tax provisions and subsidies to promote homeownership. These provisions generate an asymmetry in the tax treatment of owner- and rental-occupied housing, which affects the incentives to supply tenant-occupied housing. This paper analyzes the quantitative importance of the interaction of these provisions with the progressivity of income taxation in the context of an overlapping generations model with housing and rental markets. The model replicates the key facts observed in the economy, as well as distributional patterns of ownership, house size, and landlord behavior. The model suggests that the progressivity of income taxation can amplify or mitigate the effects of the asymmetries with important implications for housing tenure, housing consumption, portfolio reallocations, and welfare that differ from those reported in the literature.     

关于完善上市公司股权激励税收政策的思考

在实施“大众创业、万众创新”的战略大背景下,股权激励作为一种长期薪酬激励制度与促进创业创新的重要手段备受关注.股权激励效应的充分发挥有赖于税收政策的大力支持与有效配合.而我国现行股权激励税收政策设计遵循的是“公平优先、兼顾效率”原则,未能有效地引导、促进股权激励的发展,尚存在一些问题:一是股权激励税收政策设计目的与股权激励目标有冲突;二是股票期权计划分类不科学、税收政策导向不明确;三是授权日或行权日纳税的规定影响股权激励效用的发挥,极易诱发高管的机会主义行为;四是股权激励税收优惠政策不完善、税收优惠力度不足;五是上市公司与非上市公司、个人所得税与企业所得税有关股权激励的税收政策不协调.文章回顾了股权激励税收政策的已有研究,梳理了上市公司股权激励征税的国际经验,提出了完善我国上市公司股权激励税收政策的建议.