Fiscal Externalities and Efficient Transfers in a Federation

This paper investigates properties of the second best allocation in a fiscal federal system in which both federal tax and intergovernmental grants are involved and the taxation is distortionary. Also, optimal federal grants and tax policies in a decentralized fiscal system are examined. Our major findings are: (i) the second best does not require the equalization of marginal cost of public funds across regions in a conventional form; (ii) matching grants based on either the local tax rates or tax revenues should be introduced to internalize the tax externality; and (iii) once lump-sum and matching grants are optimized, federal tax policy becomes redundant so the optimal fiscal gap is indeterminate.     

Understanding the decline in Japan's saving rate in the new millennium

The decline in Japan's household saving rate accelerated sharply after the domestic banking crisis in 1997/98, but then decelerated again from around 2004/05. Such nonlinear movement in the saving rate cannot be explained by the monotonic trend of population aging alone. First, we statistically confirm the existence of such nonlinearity in aggregate data. Second, extending the life-cycle and the permanent income hypothesis (LCPIH), we exhibit that a significant decline in household income growth in the late 1990s and early 2000s plays a major role in creating the sharp saving rate decline in the same period. Third, using income and consumption data from the Family Income and Expenditure Survey, it is shown that different saving rate variations of different age groups, responding to heterogeneous income shocks, have contributed to generating the recent aggregate saving rate fluctuations. In particular, the income slow down in early 2000s of older working households provide a major contribution to aggregate saving rate decline.     

How to Fight Hard Core Cartels? Comments on Collusion in Industrial Economics

Industrial economics has successfully clarified the mechanism of collusive conduct and its facilitating factors. But policy implications for remedial actions are less straightforward. This paper provides some supplementary comments from the viewpoint of enforcement issues against price-fixing agreements. There are some disagreements among practitioners concerning the probative value of circumstantial (or economic) evidence. Information exchange may be a possible clue to elucidate the evidentiary standard. On the other hand, there seems to be a unanimous agreement, if appropriately designed, on the desirability of leniency programs. Necessity of leniency programs must be a reflection of stricter standard of proof in court decisions, resource constraints of antitrust enforcer, or increasingly defensive acts of conspirators.     

Measuring business cycles: A wavelet analysis of economic time series

Multiresolution wavelet analysis is a natural way to decompose an economic time series into trend, cycle, and noise. The method is illustrated with GDP data. The business-cycle component of the wavelet-filtered series closely resembles the series filtered by the approximate bandpass filter.     

Economic integration and fiscal devolution

In this paper we investigate how economic integration influences the political decision of integration and separation of jurisdictions. In a model with (imperfect) capital mobility, we consider that, not only the redistributive policy itself, but also the level of policy centralization is decided by a majority vote. We find that the net benefit from integration is not monotonic with the level of world capital market integration and present a case where integration of two regions occurs only for intermediate levels of mobility. This conclusion relies on the comparison of the regional majorities’ utility under the various regimes. The benefits from integration arise from the elimination of tax competition across jurisdictions, which allows for more income redistribution, whereas the costs are linked to the diversity of preferences across regions, namely that of the decisive voters. We also show that a federal regime is better than complete centralization in keeping a nation united.     

A simple dynamic decentralized leadership model with private savings and local borrowing regulation

This paper considers a simple dynamic decentralized leadership model with local borrowing and regional productivity-enhancing investment. In this model, the central government is benevolent but cannot commit to ex post intergovernmental transfer policies, while local governments act strategically after accounting for the ex post motives of the central government. We then investigate inefficiency in the subgame perfect equilibrium. We analyze the effect of central control on local borrowing and show that central control is of no benefit because ex ante local taxation works to offset it. We find the model yields different policy implications that central control is effective when extended to the case of residential mobility.     

Government size,democracy, and corruption: An empirical investigation

Previous studies on the effect of government size on corruption have produced mixed results. In an attempt to explain these ambiguous results, this study investigates the effect of government size on corruption by taking into account the role of the democracy in each country. Using annual data of 82 countries between 1995 and 2008, the estimation results indicate that an increase in government size can lead to a decrease in corruption if the democracy level is sufficiently high and, in contrast, can lead to an increase in corruption if it is too low. As robustness checks, the estimations using a different index of corruption and a different proxy for government size are also conducted. The results reveal that our main findings are robust. Furthermore, to address endogeneity problems, we conduct the instrumental variables estimation and the system generalized method of moments estimation, the results of which also support our primary findings. These results provide some important implications for policymakers seeking to perform government interventions without aggravating corruption.