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作者:Ireland, NJ
作者单位:University of Warwick
摘要:It is well-known that status-seeking produces distortions in consumption. Competition to achieve status leads to over-consumption of those goods which confer status. It has been found that taxing such goods may even lead to Pareto improvements. In this paper we extend a model of status, which relies on a signalling equilibrium approach, to include the individual labour supply decision and an income tax. We show that a Pareto-improving income tax can exist even with the simplest tax/benefit sch...
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作者:Heyes, AG; Liston-Heyes, C
作者单位:University of London; Royal Holloway University London
摘要:Existing analyses of the implications of price-cap regulation for the development of cost-reducing technologies assume that all R&D is done by the regulated industry. This is unrealistic. We present a simple model of non-cooperative R&D by a regulated firm and a single 'external' developer under a price-cap regime of the sort characterised by Cabral and Riordan. In equilibrium the external developer exerts less R&D than is socially optimal, the regulated firm may exert more or less. A 'tighten...
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作者:Clark, AE; Oswald, AJ
作者单位:University of Warwick; Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS); Universite de Orleans; Universite de Orleans
摘要:This paper describes a theory of rational emulation and deviance. It assumes that individuals care about relative position (or 'status'), and constructs a model of decisionmaking in social and economic settings. The analysis shows why individuals who want to be different from others will, paradoxically, find it rational to imitate other people. The paper also provides a choice-theoretic foundation for a number of ideas in the social psychology and economics literatures. The central point of th...
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作者:Duclos, JY
作者单位:Laval University; Laval University
摘要:We propose a class of social evaluation functions which capture the well-being of economically isolated individuals in a society. This specification is linked to the important sociological literature on socioeconomic isolation, and to the increasing importance of social exclusion as a basis for the formulation of social policy. From these social evaluation functions, which obey standard axioms of welfare economics, associated classes of indices of inequality, tax departure from proportionality...
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作者:Calfee, J; Winston, C
作者单位:Brookings Institution; American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research
摘要:Public policy has remained stoutly resistant to the economic profession's call to use congestion tolls to minimize the social costs from automobile congestion. This paper explores this issue by using stated preference models to estimate the value that commuters are willing to pay to save travel time. We find that this value is low and surprisingly insensitive to travel conditions and how toll revenues are used. It appears that even high-income commuters, having adjusted to congestion through t...
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作者:Alexander-Cook, K; Bernhardt, D; Roberts, J
作者单位:Queens University - Canada
摘要:This paper looks at the incentives to free-ride on the information signaling of others and shows how this can lead to delay in productive activity and to a cascade of activity once information is signaled. In the presence of increasing returns to scale to a profitable project, an initial pioneer may have to incur short-term losses to signal the opportunity to others. Agents may prefer to defer entry in the hope that others will incur those losses and thereby convey the information. Free-riding...
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作者:Moyes, P; Shorrocks, A
作者单位:University of Essex; Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS); Universite de Bordeaux; Universite de Bordeaux
摘要:When households are identical in all respects other than income, a non-decreasing average tax rate is both necessary and sufficient for post-tax incomes to be always at least as equal as pre-tax incomes. This paper investigates whether this well known result can be extended to households with different needs. A tax structure which never increases inequality (in the Lorenz sense) is shown to be unable to discriminate between household types. If, in addition, the tax structure never reduces the ...
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作者:Jalan, J; Ravallion, M
作者单位:The World Bank
摘要:Spatial state dependence in a growth process can imply dynamic welfare gains from poor-area development programs - gains which are not identifiable in conventional program assessments. A consumption-growth model is estimated by Generalized Method of Moments using farm-household panel data for southern China. Households living in targeted poor areas are found to have significantly higher rates of consumption growth than one would have expected, though still not enough to reverse their longer-te...
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作者:Goolsbee, A
作者单位:University of Chicago
摘要:By changing the relative gain to incorporation, corporate taxation can play an important role in a firm's choice of organizational form. General equilibrium models have shown that substantial shifting of organizational form in response to tax rates implies a large deadweight loss of taxation. This paper estimates the impact of taxes on organizational form using data from 1900-1939. The results indicate that the effect of taxes is significant but small. A. corporate rate increase of 0.10 raises...
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作者:Lang, K; Kahn, S
作者单位:Boston University
摘要:Recent research casts doubt on the view that minimum-wage laws reduce employment. We show that in a simple model of bilateral search with heterogeneous workers, a minimum-wage law increases employment. However, the increased competition from higher productivity workers makes lower productivity workers worse off without making higher productivity workers better off. We provide evidence that minimum-wage laws shift employment from adults to teenagers and students. This raises concerns about the ...