Tax Competition and Tax Revenues

It is often feared that tax competition might lead to a “race to the bottom” and that the consequence of a reduction in tax rates on capital income would be shrinking capital income tax revenues and difficulties for national governments to perform their usual tasks. The following paper analyses what happened to tax revenues in a number of OECD countries. It turns out that taxes on capital income contribute to the financing of public expenditure to a more or less unchanged extent; nor are there significant changes in the level and structure of total tax revenues.      

The Accuracy of Owner-Provided House Values: The 1978–1991 American Housing Survey

The American Housing Survey (AHS) includes the owner's valuation of the house as a measure of the house's value. If owner-stated values are accurate, the AHS (as well as other survey instruments) can be used by researchers studying a variety of topics. In this study we use the metropolitan version of the AHS for three cities over fourteen years to compare owners' valuations with sales prices of houses that sold in the twelve months prior to an interview. We find that, on average, recent buyers report house values that are 8.4% higher than the stated sales prices. Further analysis indicates that these recent buyers, when compared with owners with longer tenure, overvalue their houses by 3.3%, on average. Thus, we find that the average owner overvalues his house by 5.1%. Also, differences between sales prices and owners' valuations are not related to particular characteristics of the house, occupants (other than length of tenure), or neighborhood. Thus, the use of the owners' valuations will result in accurate estimates of house price indexes and will provide reliable estimates of the prices of house and neighborhood characteristics.     

新型CFO

在目前的经济环境中,CFO的作用已经发生了根本性的变化.他不仅需要熟悉数字的来龙去脉.还需要与CEO保持良好的关系,并一起驾驭公司战略.在这个前所未有的环境中,新型CFO需要像控制成本来实现新的收入预测那样,从容地处理战略和机遇问题.     

Evaluating the Usefulness of the American Housing Survey for Creating House Price Indices

The American Housing Survey (AHS) is a valuable source of information on houses and occupants over time. The AHS has several advantages over sales data for use in the creation of price indices: it is readily available, has frequent observations over time and space, has data from the late 1970s through the mid-1990s, includes houses that do not sell, as well as those that do, and has information on the occupants. The drawbacks include: a time lag between the interview and the release of the data, data suppression issues, owner-stated house values, and a lack of neighborhood information. In this study, we use the metropolitan version of the AHS, which has been supplemented with the original survey data as well as Census tract data for three cities over 14 years to examine whether the AHS can be used to create indices. Indices are estimated using hedonic, repeat valuation, and hybrid techniques, overcoming some of the problems inherent in the estimation of indices. We find that the data-suppression issues and the owner-stated house values are not problematic. The biggest drawback of the AHS is its lack of objective information on neighborhood quality.     

Collective decisions with interdependent valuations

Many collective decision problems have in common that individuals’ desired outcomes are correlated but not identical. This paper studies collective decisions with private information about desired policies. Each agent holds private information which mainly concerns his own bliss point, but private information also affects all other agents. We concentrate on two specific mechanism, the median and mean mechanisms establish the existence of symmetric Bayesian Nash equilibria of the corresponding games and compare the performance of the mechanisms for different degrees of interdependencies. Applications of our framework include the provision of public goods and the design of decision processes in international organizations.     

Estimating the Economic Benefits of Cleaning Up Superfund Sites: The Case of Woburn,Massachusetts

Superfund was established in 1980 to deal with closed and abandoned hazardous waste sites. Given the large amounts of money being spent on cleanups of Superfund sites, one might hope that the money is being spent in a cost-effective manner, but there is little evidence that the estimated benefits from cleanup affect the cleanup decision. We apply the hedonic method to house prices to estimate the individual willingness to pay (WTP) to clean up a Superfund site. We then show how the individual WTP can be used to calculate the total benefits from cleaning up the site so that a cost-benefit analysis of Superfund cleanup can be undertaken. We apply our technique to the two Superfund sites in Woburn, Massachusetts. We find that the benefits from cleaning up these sites are in the range of $72 million to $122 million (1992 dollars). It is likely that these benefits are greater than the present value of the estimated costs of cleaning up these sites. Thus it appears that the cleanup of the Woburn Superfund sites results in positive net benefits to society.     

The economic situation in the Republic of Belarus

Summary For some years now the Republic of Belarus has pursued an economic policy strategy that appears to exert a certain attraction on Russian policy. The Belarusan concept is based, at heart, on the attempt to raise output quickly with the help of direct grants to enterprises, financed by the central bank. This is associated with extremely rapid growth of the money supply. Central to the negative economic trend in Belarus is the substantial overvaluation of the official exchange rate. In an attempt to counter the numerous negative repercussions of this policy, the regime is being forced to adopt ever more wide-ranging administrative interventions in economic processes. The economic outcome is such, however, that recently even President Lukashenko posed the rhetorical question ‘why is our people getting poorer from month to month..., when our industry and agriculture are developing so dynamically?’³⁰ The political leadership sees the answer in the financial crisis in Russia and a poor harvest in Belarus due to unfavourable weather conditions. Its own economic policy concept is still considered to be correct, indeed is even held up as a model for Russia. However, in the course of 1998 there was an unmistakable decline in the official rates of the GDP growth and of its aggregates. Inflation soared to more than 180%. The negative economic trend is expected to deteriorate further in 1999; GDP is forecast to contract by the order of 5%, and inflation will remain in triple figures.