Corruption as an Occupational Choice: Endogenous Corruption and Tax Policy

Corruption is endemic in many countries, and empirical studies have demonstrated how it impacts on macroeconomic indicators. Theoretical studies have generally assumed an exogenously given proportion of the population are corrupt or that the public sector is fixed in size; far fewer explore how corruption emerges endogenously. We endogenize corruption as an occupational choice. Workers choose private or public employment; public employees can be honest or corrupt. Corruption is subject to a social sanction that results in a loss of self-esteem. Those who care little about the social sanction choose to be corrupt. When a firm meets a corrupt public employee it pays a bribe to secure a reduction in the tax rate. The economy has two self-sustaining equilibria with different levels of corruption. Corruption reduces tax revenue and the tax rate that maximizes revenue. An increase in the social sanction reduces corruption but also reduces tax revenues if the economy is in a high-corruption equilibrium. Paying a wage premium to public sector workers can result in all public sector workers being corrupt. Public sector audits to detect corrupt workers always reduce corruption but can only increase welfare when they are cheap to conduct and the economy is in a low-corruption equilibrium.     

Country characteristics and preferences over tax principles

The European Union has long maintained an intention to move to the origin principle of taxation, but no progress has been made since the completion of the single market. The lack of progress seems surprising, given the significant support for the origin principle in the economic literature. However, there is a contrast between the European Union that contains countries of widely different sizes and productivity levels, and the theoretical literature that has focused on models with symmetrical countries. We extend the modelling of preferences over tax principles to incorporate asymmetries in efficiency and size. We show that asymmetry can cause disagreement among countries over tax principles to be sustained even with close economic integration. Large countries and inefficient countries are shown to prefer the origin principle. In contrast, small countries and efficient countries can have a preference for the destination principle. These results provide an insight into the political economy of the impasse in European Union tax policy.     

When are origin and destination regimes equivalent?

A series of equivalence results are established which show that a switch from a destination regime of commodity taxation to an origin regime has no real effects. These significantly generalize those in the existing literature. Assuming uniformity of taxes within each country, equivalence applies (1) in a general competitive economy with an arbitrary (finite) number of goods and factors of production, arbitrary factor taxes, and arbitrary transport costs; (2) in an imperfectly competitive economy with any form of imperfect competition and with transport costs; and (3) in monetary economies where there is some price rigidity (such as nominal wage rigidity) as long as the exchange rate is flexible. Conditions under which nonequivalence applies are also identified and discussed.     

Learning by Exporting: New Insights from Examining Firm Innovation

Empirical findings across many nations show that exporters have superior productivity compared to nonexporters and that this relationship is driven by productive firms becoming exporters. The conclusion drawn from these studies is that there is little learning from exporting. We, however, assess if there are ex post benefits that accrue to exporting firms by examining innovation outcomes. We argue that exporters can often access diverse knowledge inputs not available in the domestic market, that this knowledge can spill back to the focal firm, and that such learning can foster increased innovation. We examine product innovation and patent application counts of a representative sample of Spanish manufacturing firms from 1990 to 1997. To conduct the analysis, we use a nonlinear GMM estimator for exponential models with panel data that allows for predetermined regressors and linear feedback. We find that exporting is associated with innovation. Moreover, the panel data allow us to explore the temporal relationship between exporting and innovation. In contrast to existing findings, we find evidence of learning by exporting—albeit in dimensions not previously examined in the literature.     

Demand uncertainty,competition, and ‘non-binding’ price controls

In our paper, we will present a general model that demonstrate that a price floor or a price ceiling, although not effective at the existing market price, nevertheless alters the competitive equilibrium and leads to erroneous policy conclusions.     

Imperfect competition and the optimal combination of ad valorem and specific taxation

While it has long been recognized that under imperfect competition ad valorem and specific taxation differ in their effects, the optimal combination of the two instruments has received little attention. This paper shows how combining the two taxes can eliminate the welfare loss due to imperfect competition by inducing profit-maximizing firms to charge the appropriate Ramsey price.     

World money or domestic money: Which predicts US inflation best?

In this paper I demonstrate that McKinnon and Tan's result that world money outperforms US money in explaining US inflation is sensitive to their choice of price index. When inflation is measured by the US CPI or GNP Deflator, US money outperforms world money in explaining US inflation.