The Distribution of Wealth and Fiscal Policy in Economies With Finitely Lived Agents

We study the dynamics of the distribution of wealth in an overlapping generation economy with finitely lived agents and intergenerational transmission of wealth. Financial markets are incomplete, exposing agents to both labor and capital income risk. We show that the stationary wealth distribution is a Pareto distribution in the right tail and that it is capital income risk, rather than labor income, that drives the properties of the right tail of the wealth distribution. We also study analytically the dependence of the distribution of wealth—of wealth inequality in particular—on various fiscal policy instruments like capital income taxes and estate taxes, and on different degrees of social mobility. We show that capital income and estate taxes can significantly reduce wealth inequality, as do institutions favoring social mobility. Finally, we calibrate the economy to match the Lorenz curve of the wealth distribution of the U.S. economy.     

Income Maintenance and Labor Force Participation

The paper studies the optimal tax‐subsidy schedules in an economy where the only decision of the agents is to work, or not, with an application to the case of France. Given an income guarantee provided by the welfare state, the tax schedule that maximizes government revenue provides a benchmark, the Laffer bound, above which it is inefficient to tax. In fact, under mild conditions, a feasible allocation is second best optimal if and only if the associated taxes are lower than the Laffer bound. The only restriction that efficiency puts on the shape of the tax scheme is this upper Laffer bound. The Laffer tax scheme itself can be computed from the joint distribution of the agents' productivities and work opportunity costs. Depending on the economy, it can take widely different forms, and exhibit, for instance, negative marginal tax rates. After estimating the joint distribution of productivities and work opportunity costs on French data, I compute the Laffer bound for two subpopulations, single women and married women with two children or more. Quite surprisingly, the actual incentives to work appear to be very close to the bound.     

道德风险下带有Knight不确定的最优动态契约设计

本文从概率统计模型本身的不确定性是本质的、不能消除掉的角度出发, 研究了Knight不确定下连续时间委托-代理问题, 其中主要考虑了代理人的道德风险对契约执行过程以及契约存续情况的影响.首先, 建立了代理人延续价值以及委托人预期利润的动态方程.其次, 运用次线性期望下的随机最优性原理, 以更加准确、深刻的方法去刻画实际委托人和代理人经济行为, 进而得到委托人效用值函数的Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) 方程, 并求得委托人对代理人最优支付以及代理人最优努力水平的表达式.最后, 通过理论解的数值模拟, 分析了Knight不确定对委托人和代理人最优策略以及最优契约的影响.     

The impact of tax uncertainty on irreversible investment

Traditional models of capital budgeting with taxes are based on deterministic tax rates and tax bases. In reality, however, there are multiple sources of tax uncertainty. Frequent tax reforms make future taxation of investments a stochastic process. Fiscal authorities and tax courts create additional tax uncertainty by interpreting current tax laws differently. Moreover, simplified models that anticipate the actual tax base incorrectly contribute to tax uncertainty as perceived by investors. I analyze the effects of stochastic taxation on investment behavior in a real options model. The investor holds an option to invest in an irreversible project with stochastic cash flows and stochastic tax payments. Pre-tax cash flows and tax payments are assumed to be correlated. Increased tax uncertainty has an ambiguous impact on investment timing. For low tax uncertainty, high cash flow uncertainty and high correlation of cash flows and tax payments, increased tax uncertainty is likely to accelerate investment. A higher expected tax payment delays investment. A higher after-tax discount rate affects investment timing ambiguously.     

An Efficient Dynamic Mechanism

This paper constructs an efficient, budget‐balanced, Bayesian incentive‐compatible mechanism for a general dynamic environment with quasilinear payoffs in which agents observe private information and decisions are made over countably many periods. First, under the assumption of “private values” (other agents' private information does not directly affect an agent's payoffs), we construct an efficient, ex post incentive‐compatible mechanism, which is not budget‐balanced. Second, under the assumption of “independent types” (the distribution of each agent's private information is not directly affected by other agents' private information), we show how the budget can be balanced without compromising agents' incentives. Finally, we show that the mechanism can be made self‐enforcing when agents are sufficiently patient and the induced stochastic process over types is an ergodic finite Markov chain.     

PAYROLL TAXES,SOCIAL INSURANCE,AND BUSINESS CYCLES

Payroll taxes represent a major distortionary influence of governments on labor markets. This paper examines the role of time‐varying payroll taxes and the social safety net for cyclical fluctuations in a nonmonetary economy with labor market frictions and unemployment insurance, when the latter is only imperfectly related to search effort. A balanced social insurance budget induces countercyclical payroll taxation, renders gross wages more rigid over the cycle and strengthens the model's endogenous propagation mechanism. For conventional calibrations, the model generates a negatively sloped Beveridge curve and countercyclical unemployment as well as substantial volatility and persistence of vacancies and unemployment.     

Income determination for corporate tax purposes using IFRS as a starting point: evidence for listed companies within Austria, Germany, and The Netherlands

The internationalisation of financial accounting and the European Commission’s ambition to harmonise corporate taxation have raised the question whether IFRS accounts could be used for tax purposes. In order to quantify the effects of an IFRS-based taxation on corporate tax burdens in different EU member states, we estimate firms’ tax equity using notes on income taxes in IFRS financial statements of companies listed in Austria, Germany, and The Netherlands. The difference between estimated tax equity and IFRS-equity, adjusted for the effect resulting from the recognition of deferred taxes, shows the effect of using IFRS as a tax base on the present value of corporate taxes. We find that estimated tax equity is mostly lower than IFRS-equity, indicating that an IFRS-based taxation would often increase the present value of corporate taxes. The median of estimated tax equity is 5.6 % (Austria), 6.4 % (Germany) and 9.0 % (The Netherlands) below IFRS-equity. However, an IFRS-based taxation does not always induce higher equity as often argued in the literature. In 307 of 1,113 totally analysed firm-years, estimated tax equity exceeds IFRS-equity. To find a further estimation for the effects of tax base reforms we also approximate the total stock of unused tax losses and the amount of useable tax losses. We find that deferred tax assets for unused tax losses are depreciated to a substantial extent.     

The Newsvendor Problem and Price‐Only Contract When Bankruptcy Costs Exist

We study a supply chain of a supplier selling via a wholesale price contract to a financially constrained retailer who faces stochastic demand. The retailer might need to borrow money from a bank to execute his order. The bank offers a fairly priced loan for relevant risks. Failure of loan repayment leads to a costly bankruptcy (fixed administrative costs, costs proportional to sales, and a depressed collateral value). We identify the retailer's optimal order quantity as a function of the wholesale price and his total wealth (working capital and collateral). The analysis of the supplier's optimal wholesale price problem as a Stackelberg game, with the supplier the leader and the retailer the follower, leads to unique equilibrium solutions in wholesale price and order quantity, with the equilibrium order quantity smaller than the traditional newsvendor one. Furthermore, in the presence of the retailer's bankruptcy risks, increases in the retailer's wealth lead to increased supplier's wholesale prices, but without the retailer's bankruptcy risks the supplier's wholesale prices stay the same or decrease in retailer's wealth.     

Political Economy of Mechanisms

We study the provision of dynamic incentives to self‐interested politicians who control the allocation of resources in the context of the standard neoclassical growth model. Citizens discipline politicians using elections. We show that the need to provide incentives to the politician in power creates political economy distortions in the structure of production, which resemble aggregate tax distortions. We provide conditions under which the political economy distortions persist or disappear in the long run. If the politicians are as patient as the citizens, the best subgame perfect equilibrium leads to an asymptotic allocation where the aggregate distortions arising from political economy disappear. In contrast, when politicians are less patient than the citizens, political economy distortions remain asymptotically and lead to positive aggregate labor and capital taxes.     

Moral Hazard Contracting and Private Credit Markets

This paper studies the impact of credit markets on optimal contracting, when the agent's “interim preference” over upcoming contracts is private information because personal financial decisions affect it via the wealth effect. The main result is a severe loss of incentive provision: equilibrium contracts invariably cause the agent to shirk (i.e., exert minimal effort) if the agent's private financial decision precedes moral hazard contracting. The basic intuition is that committing on another private variable, other than the effort level, exposes the parties to further exploitation of efficient risk‐sharing by relaxing the incentive constraint that was binding ex ante, unless the risk‐sharing was fully efficient to begin with.     

BUILDING REPUTATION FOR CONTRACT RENEWAL: IMPLICATIONS FOR PERFORMANCE DYNAMICS AND CONTRACT DURATION

We study how career concerns affect the dynamics of incentives in a multi‐period contract, when the agent's productivity is a stochastic function of his past productivity and investment. We show that incentives are stronger and performance is higher when the contract approaches its expiry date. Contrary to common wisdom, long‐term contracts may strengthen reputational effects whereas short‐term contracting may be optimal when investment has persistent, long‐term effects.     

Environmental Taxes and the Choice of Green Technology

We study several important aspects of using environmental taxes to motivate the choice of innovative and “green" emissions‐reducing technologies as well as the role of fixed cost subsidies and consumer rebates in this process. In our model, a profit‐maximizing monopolistic firm facing price‐dependent demand selects emissions control technology, production quantity, and price in response to the tax, subsidy, and rebate levels set by the regulator. The available technologies vary in environmental efficiency as well as in the fixed and variable costs. Both the optimal policy for the firm and the social‐welfare maximizing policy for the regulator are analyzed. We find that the firm's reaction to an increase in taxes may be non‐monotone: while an initial increase in taxes may motivate a switch to a greener technology, further tax increases may motivate a reverse switch. For the regulator, we compare the social welfare achievable in the centralized system (which serves as an upper bound) to the highest level achievable under different classes of environmental policies. If the regulator is limited to a tax‐only policy, then when the regulator is moderately concerned with environmental impacts, the tax level that maximizes social welfare simultaneously motivates the choice of clean technology and closes the gap to the upper bound; however, both low and high levels of societal environmental concerns may lead to the choice of dirty technology and significant welfare losses as compared to the centralized case. Supplementing the environmental taxation with fixed cost subsidies and consumer rebates can eliminate this effect, expanding the range of parameters over which the green technology is chosen and often closing the welfare gap to the centralized solution.     

A POLITICAL ECONOMY THEORY OF FISCAL POLICY AND UNEMPLOYMENT

This paper presents a political economy theory of fiscal policy and unemployment. The underlying economy is one in which unemployment can arise but can be mitigated by tax cuts and increases in public production. Such policies are fiscally costly, but can be financed by issuing government debt. Policy decisions are made by a legislature consisting of representatives from different political districts. With the available policies, it is possible for the government to completely eliminate unemployment in the long run. However, with political decision making, the economy always has unemployment. Unemployment is higher when the private sector experiences negative shocks. When these shocks occur, the government employs debt‐financed fiscal stimulus plans which involve both tax cuts and public production increases. When the private sector is healthy, the government contracts debt until it reaches a floor level. Unemployment levels are weakly increasing in the economy's debt level, strictly so when the private sector experiences negative shocks. Conditional on the level of workers employed, the mix of public and private output is distorted.     

Forschungsziele der Betriebswirtschaftlichen Steuerlehre in der Kritik

In this article the understanding of the scientific functions of business taxation represented by Jochen Hundsdoerfer, Dirk Kiesewetter and Caren Sureth is critically analyzed. It is argued that hypotheses on the influence of taxes on decisions, as far as they are based on neoclassical models, are not applicable to explain the actions of tax payers. These arguments at the same time object the realization of a neutral tax system. They further contradict the realization of a tax system, which is supposed to have an impact or which avoids taxes to have an effect on decisions, provided that the criticized hypotheses are used as a basis. Fiscal law standards should rather fulfil the principle of equability of taxation. It is supposed that such fiscal law standards have an effect on decisions of tax payers, which are contradictory to the aim of an equable taxation. Therefore hypotheses from scientific experience of the actual effect of taxes on decisions must be taken into account. Hence the object of this analysis is to investigate the real influence of taxes on decisions detached from neo-classical models.     

GETTING IT DONE: DYNAMIC INCENTIVES TO COMPLETE A PROJECT

A principal wants an agent to complete a project. The agent undertakes unobservable effort, which affects in each period the probability that the project is completed. We characterize the contracts that the principal sets, with and without commitment. With full commitment, the contract involves the agent's value and wage declining over time, in order to give the agent incentives to exert effort. The best sequentially rational equilibrium for the principal also involves the agent's wage declining over time, while the worst sequentially rational equilibrium for the principal has a constant wage (and is in fact the unique stationary equilibrium). The best (weakly) renegotiation‐proof equilibrium for the principal is achieved by a constant wage that maximizes the principal's payoff, conditional on wages being constant. We compare these solutions to the efficient outcome.     

ECONOMICS AND CLIMATE CHANGE: INTEGRATED ASSESSMENT IN A MULTI‐REGION WORLD

This paper develops a model that integrates the climate and the global economy—an integrated assessment model—with which different policy scenarios can be analyzed and compared. The model is a dynamic stochastic general‐equilibrium setup with a continuum of regions. Thus, it is a full stochastic general‐equilibrium version of RICE, Nordhaus’s pioneering multi‐region integrated assessment model. Like RICE, our model features traded fossil fuel but otherwise has no markets across regions—there is no insurance nor any intertemporal trade across them. The extreme form of market incompleteness is not fully realistic but arguably not a bad approximation of reality. Its major advantage is that, along with a set of reasonable assumptions on preferences, technology, and nature, it allows a closed‐form model solution. We use the model to assess the welfare consequences of carbon taxes that differ across as well as within oil‐consuming and ‐producing regions. We show that, surprisingly, only taxes on oil producers can improve the climate: taxes on oil consumers have no effect at all. The calibrated model suggests large differences in views on climate policy across regions.     

A Polynomial Optimization Approach to Principal–Agent Problems

This paper presents a new method for the analysis of moral hazard principal–agent problems. The new approach avoids the stringent assumptions on the distribution of outcomes made by the classical first‐order approach and instead only requires the agent's expected utility to be a rational function of the action. This assumption allows for a reformulation of the agent's utility maximization problem as an equivalent system of equations and inequalities. This reformulation in turn transforms the principal's utility maximization problem into a nonlinear program. Under the additional assumptions that the principal's expected utility is a polynomial and the agent's expected utility is rational in the wage, the final nonlinear program can be solved to global optimality. The paper also shows how to first approximate expected utility functions that are not rational by polynomials, so that the polynomial optimization approach can be applied to compute an approximate solution to nonpolynomial problems. Finally, the paper demonstrates that the polynomial optimization approach extends to principal–agent models with multidimensional action sets.     

INCOME AND WEALTH CONCENTRATION IN SPAIN FROM A HISTORICAL AND FISCAL PERSPECTIVE

This paper presents series on top shares of income and wealth in Spain using personal income and wealth tax return statistics. Top income shares are highest in the 1930s, fall sharply during the first decade of the Franco dictatorship, then remain stable and low till the 1980s, and have increased since the mid 1990s. The top 0.01% income share in Spain estimated from income tax data is comparable to estimates for the United States and France over the period 1933–1971. Those findings, along with a careful analysis of all published tax statistics, suggest that income tax evasion and avoidance among top income earners in Spain was much less prevalent than previously thought. Wealth concentration has been about stable from 1982 to 2005 as surging real estate prices have benefited the middle class and compensated for a slight increase in financial wealth concentration in the 1990s. We use our wealth series and a simple model to analyze the effects of the wealth tax exemption of stocks for owners‐managers introduced in 1994. We show that the reform induced substantial shifting from the taxable to tax exempt status, hence creating efficiency costs. (JEL D31, H31, O15)     

INFORMATION SHARING IN COMMON AGENCY: WHEN IS TRANSPARENCY GOOD?

When should principals dealing with a common agent share their individual performance measures about the agent's unobservable effort for producing a public good? In a model with two principals who offer linear incentive schemes, we show that information sharing always increases total expected welfare if the principal who is less informed about the agent's effort also cares more about the agent's output. If the less‐informed principal cares somewhat (but not too much) less than the other principal about the agent's output, information sharing reduces total expected welfare. In our model the efficient information regime emerges as an equilibrium outcome. (JEL: D82, D86, M52)     

EQUILIBRIUM SEARCH UNEMPLOYMENT,ENDOGENOUS PARTICIPATION,AND LABOR MARKET FLOWS

The sustainability of welfare states requires high employment and high participation to raise the tax base. To analyze labor supply in a world with market frictions, we propose and solve a macro model of the labor market with unemployment and labor force participation as endogenous and distinct states. In our world, workers' decisions of participating are determined by an entry decision and an exit decision. A calibration of the model improves the usual representations of labor markets, since it quantitatively accounts for the observed flows between employment and nonparticipation. The paper investigates also the effect of payroll taxes and unemployment benefits on participation decisions. Taxes reduce entries and increase exits, whereas unemployment benefits, at a given job‐finding rate, raise entries and have ambiguous effects on exits. (JEL: J2, J6)