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作者：Brunetti, Michael J.
摘要：This paper uses data from San Francisco probate records to estimate if, and to what extent, the estate tax forces the sale of family businesses and farms; this question cannot be addressed with estate tax return data. Farmers and small business owners frequently complain that the estate tax makes it difficult to pass their operations on to their heirs. If there are insufficient liquid assets in the entrepreneur's estate, the heirs may be forced to sell the enterprise in order to pay the estate...
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作者：Fleurbaey, Marc
作者单位：Universite Paris Cite; Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
摘要：In a model where agents have unequal skills and heterogeneous preferences about consumption goods and leisure, this paper studies how to combine commodity taxes and non-linear income tax. It proposes a particular social welfare function on the basis of fairness principles. It then derives a simple criterion for evaluating the social welfare consequences of various tax schedules. Under the proposed approach, the optimal tax should have no commodity tax for some range of consumptions, and income...
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作者：Boadway, Robin; Gahvari, Firouz
作者单位：University of Illinois System; University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; Queens University - Canada
摘要：This paper studies the optimal commodity taxation problem when time taken in consumption is a perfect substitute for either labor or leisure. It shows that while labor substitutability affects the optimal tax structure, leisure substitutability leaves the classical optimal tax results intact. In the Ramsey tax framework with linear income taxes, whether the consumers have the same or different earning abilities, labor substitutes tend to be taxed at a higher rate than leisure substitutes with ...
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作者：Raimondos-Moller, Pascalis; Woodland, Alan D.
作者单位：Copenhagen Business School; University of Sydney
摘要：This paper introduces an index of tax optimality that measures the distance of some current tax structure from the optimal tax structure in the presence of public goods. This index is defined on the [0, 1] interval and measures the proportion of the optimal tax rates that will achieve the same welfare outcome as some arbitrarily given initial tax structure. We call this number the Tax Optimality Index. We also show how the basic methodology can be altered to derive a revenue equivalent uniform...
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作者：Austen-Smith, David; Wallerstein, Michael
作者单位：Northwestern University; Yale University
摘要：The paper develops an integrated political economy model in which individuals are distinguished by earning ability and an ascriptive characteristic, race. The policy space is a transfer payment to low-income workers financed by a flat tax on wages and an affirmative action constraint on firms' hiring decisions. The distribution of income and the policy are endogenous, with the latter being the outcome of a legislative bargaining game between three legislative blocs. The model provides support ...
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作者：Romanov, Dmitri
摘要：Shifting of income between the corporate and the personal income tax bases in response to tax incentives is the premise of the literature on taxation and organizational form. Empirical evidence of income shifting is, however, merely circumstantial. Using a unique panel of high-frequency VAT data from Israel, we trace the footprints of income shifting through incorporation by high-income individuals who convert their labor income into less-taxed dividends. A rise in the personal income tax rate...
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作者：Bordignon, Massimo; Brusco, Sandro
作者单位：State University of New York (SUNY) System; Stony Brook University; Universidad Carlos III de Madrid; Catholic University of the Sacred Heart
摘要：We analyze the issues relative to the formation of sub-unions in a federation, called enhanced cooperation agreements in the European Union. When centralization is not politically feasible, an agreement among a subset of countries may allow such countries to exploit benefits from coordination that would other-wise be lost. Other countries in the federation may object to the sub-union because it changes the status quo; if cooperation at the federal level becomes convenient in the future, the ch...
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作者：Chetty, Raj
作者单位：University of California System; University of California Berkeley; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：In an influential paper, Baily (1978) showed that the optimal level of unemployment insurance (UI) in a stylized static model depends on only three parameters: risk aversion, the consumption-smoothing benefit of UI, and the elasticity of unemployment durations with respect to the benefit rate. This paper examines the key economic assumptions under which these parameters determine the optimal level of social insurance. I show that a Baily-type expression, with an adjustment for precautionary sa...
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作者：Pozzi, Lorenzo
作者单位：Ghent University
摘要：In the US, aggregate private consumption changes are excessively sensitive not only to current and lagged changes in income, but also to current and lagged changes in government expenditures. I give a new theoretical interpretation to this observation. I show that this excess sensitivity arises when consumers take into account the link between taxes and government expenditures (i.e. when they are Ricardian), but lack exact information on the aggregate economy. While the model provides a simult...
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作者：Cremer, Jacques; Palfrey, Thomas R.
作者单位：California Institute of Technology; Universite de Toulouse; Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
摘要：This paper proposes a framework for studying policy making in a federal system in the presence of spillover externalities. Local jurisdictions choose local policies by majority rule subject to standards that are set by majority rule at the federal level. We characterize the induced preferences of voters for federal policies, prove existence of local majority rule equilibrium, provide an example of non-existence of global majority rule equilibrium, and explore the welfare properties of federal ...
