TAX DATA FOR WEALTH CONCENTRATION ANALYSIS: AN APPLICATION TO SPANISH WEALTH TAX

As recent studies in different countries show, tax data offer the opportunity to estimate income or wealth shares for the upper income groups. However, several critical points must be considered in order to avoid misleading conclusions: the interpolation technique used, legal amendments, and tax fraud. In this note we take Spanish wealth tax as a case study to assess the importance of these factors, and compare our results with those obtained by Alvaredo and Saez (2009 ). Although the results of the two analyses are very similar, our approach complements theirs by offering a more precise treatment of the correction of fiscal underassessment and tax fraud in real estate, which is the main asset in Spaniards' portfolios.     

贸易政策、出口和经济增长——基于拉美国家实证数据的研究

20世纪40年代起,拉美国家采取的是以贸易保护思想为基础的进口替代政策,70年代中期开始,大部分拉美国家开始了以贸易开放、资本开放为核心的“新自由主义改革”。本文首先对拉美对外贸易政策的沿革进行回顾,就拉美的“新自由主义”改革的实效进行了一个基本考察,在此基础上,通过计量模型详细探讨了拉美国家的出口和经济增长的关系。     

The Blocking Lemma for a many-to-one matching model

The Blocking Lemma identifies a particular blocking pair for each non-stable and individually rational matching that is preferred by some agents of one side of the market to their optimal stable matching. Its interest lies in the fact that it has been an instrumental result to prove key results on matching. For instance, the fact that in the college admissions problem the workers-optimal stable mechanism is group strategy-proof for the workers and the strong stability theorem in the marriage model follow directly from the Blocking Lemma. However, it is known that the Blocking Lemma and its consequences do not hold in the general many-to-one matching model in which firms have substitutable preference relations. We show that the Blocking Lemma holds for the many-to-one matching model in which firms’ preference relations are, in addition to substitutable, quota q-separable. We also show that the Blocking Lemma holds on a subset of substitutable preference profiles if and only if the workers-optimal stable mechanism is group strategy-proof for the workers on this subset of profiles.     

Modeling public transport corridors with aggregate and disaggregate demand

Microeconomic public transport models aimed at maximizing social benefits usually consider demand in an aggregate manner. In this paper we examine the effect of this approach on the optimal values of frequency and vehicle size by comparison with models where demand is described in detail as a matrix of flows between every station in a single line service. The theoretical analysis and the numerical examples suggest that the spatially aggregated model underestimates optimal frequency and overestimates vehicle size.     

International Technology Diffusion: Effects of Trade and FDI

There has been little analysis of the effect of inward FDI on international R&D diffusion, especially in LDCs, although FDI has become the core of international production and LDCs have been receiving an increasing share of world FDI over the past few decades. Using data from 57 countries from 1988 to 2001, we find that both FDI and trade serve as important channels of international technology diffusion. However, there exist heterogeneous effects of FDI in DCs and LDCs. For inward FDI to promote technology diffusion in LDCs, a certain threshold of human capital has to be reached.     

Internet Adoption and Advertising Expenditures on Traditional Media: An Empirical Analysis Using a Panel of Countries

The Internet can affect advertising expenditures through various channels. This paper quantifies the relationships between Internet adoption and changes in advertising expenditures on traditional offline media types. I use a panel of 11 years of data at the country level that contains information on advertising expenditures by medium and Internet penetration for more than 80 countries. I find that increases in Internet penetration are negatively correlated with changes in advertising expenditures on newspapers, magazines, and television, but I do not find conclusive results for the correlation between Internet adoption and changes in advertising expenditures on radio.     

Legal form and risk exposure in Spanish firms

Abstract. It is well-known that the legal form adopted by a firm determines the type of legal responsibility borne by its owners in case of bankruptcy. In this paper we argue that a firm under a limited liability status should be characterized by a higher than average bankruptcy probability, which ultimately captures their risk exposure when output is affected by exogenous shocks. To test this prediction we extend Lee's (1976) switching regressions model to a panel dataset of 1313 Spanish firms from 1990–1994, separating them into corporate and entrepreneurial forms (with/without limited liability, respectively). We consider both random effects and fixed effects panel data models, taking into account the potential endogeneity between risk exposure and the legal form choice. Our results confirm the hypothesis that firms under limited liability have significant higher risk exposure than firms under unlimited liability. The authors gratefully acknowledge valuable suggestions from Maite Martínez-Granado, A. Jorge Padilla, Javier Suárez and two anonymous referees. Data and financial support provided by the Fundación Empresa Pública (Madrid) and comments from participants at seminars held at CEMFI, Simposio de Análisis Económico and Universidad de Vigo are also sincerely appreciated. Mr. Campos particularly acknowledges research funding by the University of Las Palmas.     

Economic and environmental efficiency using a social accounting matrix

This paper aims to show the utility of the so-called Social Accounting Matrix and Environmental Accounts (SAMEA) for economic and environmental efficiency analysis. The article uses the SAMEA for Spain in 2000, applied to water resources and greenhouse gas emissions. This matrix is used as a central core of a multisectorial model of economic and environmental performance, and it calculates the denominated “domestics SAMEA multipliers” and their decomposition into characteristic, direct, indirect and induced effects. These multipliers show some evaluation of economic and environmental efficiency. Also, we present an application of these multipliers that demonstrates that there is no causal interrelation between those sectors with higher economic backward linkages and those with higher environmental deterioration backward linkages.     

Subgame Perfect Equilibria in Stage Games

It is well known that a stage game with infinite choice-sets, unless it contains a public coordination-device in each stage, may have no subgame perfect equilibria. We show that if a game with public coordination-devices has a subgame perfect equilibrium in which two players in each stage use non-atomic strategies, then the game without coordination devices also has a subgame perfect equilibrium. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C6, C7, D8.