Capital Income Tax Rate Research Articles

Redistributive Capital Taxation Revisited

This paper uses a rich quantitative model with endogenous skill acquisition to show that capital-skill complementarity provides a quantitatively significant rationale to tax capital for redistributive governments. The optimal capital income tax rate is 67 percent, while it is 61 percent in an identically calibrated model without capital-skill complementarity. The skill premium falls from 1.9 to 1.84 along the transition following the optimal reform in the capital-skill complementarity model, implying substantial indirect redistribution from skilled to unskilled workers. These results show that a redistributive government should take into account capital-skill complementarity when taxing capital. (JEL D31, H21, H23, H24, H25, J24, J31)

Supply-side economics with AS-AD in Ramsey dynamic general equilibrium

The Ramsey dynamic general equilibrium (RDGE) model has been applied broadly within mainstream macroeconomic analysis. While the labor market of the RDGE model has long been developed, any consensus on the goods market has remained elusive. This has made supply-side policy analysis within it difficult since it is founded upon the premise of aggregate supply (AS) featuring more prominently than aggregate demand (AD). Specifying a relative price of output that makes the goods market consistent with the recursive structure of the RDGE paradigm, the paper then applies AS-AD quantitatively to study productivity increases and income tax rate decreases that have been a centerpiece in supply-side economics. The paper contributes how both a productivity increase and a capital income tax rate decrease cause a net shift out of AS relative to AD that lowers the relative price of output. It shows how productivity increases and tax rate reductions quantitatively increase macroeconomic variables. The increase in economic activity remains proportional to the percentage increase in productivity, giving rise to our introduction of the concept of a productivity multiplier. Tax rate reductions cause increased economic activity at a decreasing rate as the level of the tax rate decreases. The paper shows the sense in which capital income tax rate reductions quantitatively have larger magnitude effects on output, consumption, investment, and capital wealth, while labor income tax rate reductions have larger magnitude effects on employment. Tax revenue implications are also presented with the first Laffer curves linked to the RDGE AS-AD analysis. Limitations, extensions and policy applications are suggested.

Adjustments of factor income tax rates and aggregate (in)stability

AbstractA general wisdom, since at least the work of Schmitt-Grohé and Uribe [(1997) Journal of Political Economy 105, 976–1000.], holds that a government that relies on adjusting factor income tax rates to achieve budget objective may induce aggregate instability driven by self-fulfilling expectations. This paper shows that this conventional wisdom may be overturned if the rate of adjustment of the capital income tax rate is bigger than that of the labor income tax rate. How much bigger depends on country specifics and particularly on the levels of the capital and labor income tax rates. Thus, adjustments in capital and labor income tax rates, if properly designed and implemented, can help achieve the budget objective while at the same time preempting extrinsic volatility.

Generational Distribution of Fiscal Burdens: A Positive Analysis

AbstractThis study presents an overlapping generations model to analyze the impact of population aging on fiscal policy and intergenerational fiscal burden. Aging populations incentivize governments to increase capital and labor income tax rates and the public debt‐to‐GDP ratio, consistent with OECD evidence. Our model‐based simulation for Japan and the United States (2000–2070) reveals that Japan will experience higher labor income tax rates, a greater public debt‐to‐GDP ratio, and a lower government expenditure‐to‐GDP ratio compared to the United States. From 2040 onward, Japan is predicted to surpass the United States in terms of the capital tax rate.

Income sources, cyclical behaviors of fiscal policy, and welfare conflict

AbstractThis paper explores the effect of fiscal policy on the welfare of heterogeneous agents with different income sources over the business cycle. Policy experiments allow the government to choose the cyclical properties of fiscal policy instruments conditional on long-run levels to separately maximize the welfare of entrepreneurs and workers. This policy choice creates welfare conflicts between the two groups, which is confirmed by empirical evidence. The government maximizes workers’ welfare by choosing procyclical capital income tax rates and countercyclical labor income tax rates while it optimizes entrepreneurs’ welfare with countercyclical capital income tax rates and strongly countercyclical labor income tax rates. The socially optimal policy is a tradeoff between the welfare of entrepreneurs and workers. The welfare conflict holds when the government modifies the cyclical behavior of policy in a crisis, or it adjusts the long-run level and cyclical behavior at the same time.

Does idiosyncratic risk matter for climate policy?

AbstractThis paper studies the implications of distortions in intertemporal margins for the conduct of climate policy. We do so by introducing a framework that combines a standard two-period overlapping generations (OLG) model with a tractable model of household heterogeneity, in which over-accumulation of capital arises from uninsurable idiosyncratic labor income risk. We illustrate that market-based climate policies must be adjusted when the government cannot provide full insurance to households by taxing only capital and is constrained to transfer resources across generations for risk-sharing. In a numerical exercise, we find that idiosyncratic risk leads to an optimal capital income tax rate of 35 per cent and a carbon price 7.5 per cent lower than its first best.

Technological progress and optimal income taxation

Facing technological progress, how should a government reform income taxation? To address this question, optimal capital and labor income taxation is obtained for an economy of heterogeneous individuals. Technological progress raises optimal capital income tax rate and lowers optimal average marginal labor income tax rate if it is capital-biased by increasing relative capital productivity. Technological progress does the opposite if it is labor-biased by decreasing relative capital productivity. Neither capital-biased nor labor-biased technological progress affects optimal slope of labor income tax rate schedule. Technological progress does not affect optimal income taxation if it is unbiased by preserving relative capital productivity.

Explaining the decline in the US labor share: taxation and automation

This study provides evidence for the USA that the secular decline in the labor share is not only explained by technical change or globalization, but also by the dynamics of factor taxation, automation capital (robots), and population growth. First, we empirically find indications of co-integration for the period from the last quarter of the 20th to the first decade of the twenty-first century. Permanent effects on factor shares emanate from relative factor taxation. The latter also have a lasting effect on the use of robots. Variance decompositions reveal that taxing contributes to changes in the two income shares and in automation capital. Second, we analyze and calibrate a neoclassical growth model extended to include factor taxation, automation capital, and capital adjustment costs. Labor and automation capital are perfect substitutes, whereas labor and traditional capital are complements. The model replicates the dynamics of the observed functional income distribution in the USA during the 1965–2015 period. Counterfactual experiments suggest that the fall in the labor share would have been significantly smaller if labor and capital income tax rates had remained at their respective level of the 1960s.

Understanding international differences in the skill premium: The role of capital taxes and transfers

We show that the size of the tax and transfer system affects the level of wage inequality in a heterogeneous agent/incomplete markets model, extended to allow for capital–skill complementarity. The skill premium can decrease significantly with an increase in the size of the tax and transfer system due to a rise in the capital income tax rate when idiosyncratic shocks to labor productivity are not insurable. The differences in the steady-state skill premium under different capital income tax rates are consistent with those observed across countries.

Revisiting Uzawa–Lucas with public human capital spending and productivity heterogeneity

PurposeThis paper aims to study the effects of public human capital spending on growth under the presence of financial frictions and productivity heterogeneity. In addition, this paper derives and discusses growth-maximizing policy.Design/methodology/approachThis paper constructs a tractable human capital–based growth model. There a continuum of heterogeneous entrepreneurs who own private firms, accumulate personal wealth and face collateral borrowing constraints. The representative worker accumulates human capital by using his own efforts, the existing human capital stock and human capital–related public services. The government finances public spending by taxing capital income. This paper then focuses its analysis on the balanced growth path equilibrium of the economy model.FindingsThis paper finds that public human capital spending financed by capital income taxation yields strictly higher growth than when the spending is absent. In addition, it shows that the growth-maximizing capital income tax rate is higher when the idiosyncratic firm productivity distribution is more heavy tailed.Originality/valueThis paper embraces and then explores the effects of productivity heterogeneity and financial frictions into an otherwise conventional human capital–based endogenous growth model. This paper also differs from the conventional endogenous growth framework by incorporating the productive role of public services in the process of accumulating human capital. Therefore, it can address the effects of public spending on growth.

Explaining the Decline in the US Labor Share: Taxation and Automation

This study provides evidence for the US that the secular decline in the labor share is not only explained by technical change or globalization, but also by the dynamics of factor taxation, automation capital, and population growth. First, we empirically find indications of co-integration for the 1974-2008 period. Permanent effects on factor shares emanate from relative factor taxation. The latter also have a lasting effect on the use of robots. Variance decompositions reveal that taxing contributes to changes in the two income shares and in automation capital. Second, we analyse and calibrate a neoclassical growth model extended to include factor taxation, automation capital, and capital adjustment costs. The model is able to replicate the dynamics of the observed functional income distribution in the US during the 1965-2015 period. Counterfactual experiments suggest that the fall in the labor share would have been significantly smaller if labor and capital income tax rates had remained at their respective level of the 1960s.

Taxation and the external wealth of nations: Evidence from bilateral portfolio holdings

This paper examines the impact of capital income taxation on the composition of foreign portfolio investment and on long-term external wealth. Using data on bilateral portfolio positions for a sample of 37 countries over the period 2001–2017, we find that capital gains and dividend taxation reduce the share of equities in foreign investments, while interest taxation increases this share. To examine the potential effects of capital income tax reform on long-term external wealth, we simulate tax reforms in which each country replaces its actual capital income tax rates by the average tax rates in the sample. We find that the external wealth effects of such reforms can be very substantial, with estimates ranging from +8.5% for Japan to −10% for New Zealand.

Tax cuts in open economies

A reduction in capital tax rates generates substantial dynamic responses within the framework of the standard neoclassical growth model. The short-run revenue loss after a tax cut is partly — or, depending on parameter values, even completely — offset by growth in the long-run, due to the resulting incentives to further accumulate capital. We study how the dynamic response of government revenue to a tax cut changes if we allow a Ramsey economy to engage in international trade: the open economy's ability to reallocate resources between labor-intensive and capital-intensive industries reduces the negative effect of factor accumulation on factor returns, thus encouraging the economy to accumulate more than it would do under autarky. We explore the quantitative implications of this intuition for the US in terms of two issues recently treated in the literature: dynamic scoring and the Laffer curve. Our results demonstrate that international trade enhances the response of government revenue to tax cuts by a relevant amount. In our benchmark calibration, a reduction in the capital-income tax rate has virtually no effect on government revenues in steady state.

Fiscal shocks and spillovers in a dynamic two-country model

This paper examines the cross-border effects of domestic fiscal shocks on foreign economic activities by constructing a two-country general equilibrium model. The model yields two main results by comparing four alternative fiscal shocks: government spending, the capital income tax rate, the labor income tax rate, and the consumption tax rate. First, domestic fiscal shocks can generate sizable spillovers abroad. Second, once the size of each fiscal shock is normalized to achieve an equal change in government revenue, the spillover effects of different fiscal shocks on the foreign economic variables are qualitatively similar.

Fiscal devaluation and labor market frictions in a monetary union

We evaluate the macroeconomic and labor market impact of a fiscal devaluation in one region of a monetary union. We simulate a monetary-union model of the euro area (EA) and the world economy featuring search-and-matching labor markets. We obtain the following results. First, a region-specific devaluation improves trade-competitiveness, macroeconomic conditions, and employment. Second, a permanent regional fiscal devaluation has more expansionary labor-intensive effects than lowering the capital income tax rate and increasing the consumption tax rate. Third, simultaneous EA-wide and world-wide fiscal devaluations have expansionary effects on macroeconomic and labor market conditions. Fourth, a EA accommodative monetary policy enhances the expansionary effects of the EA-wide fiscal devaluation on the generic Member State; to the opposite, the Member State faces lower economic activity and employment if the world-wide fiscal devaluation is accompanied by an accommodative monetary stance outside the EA.

Taxing Capital in the Presence of Trickle Down Effects: A Sufficient Statistics Approach

Within a rich dynamic environment I derive a robust and testable condition for the optimality of capital income tax rates. I apply this condition to US data. Endogenous responses of factor prices mitigate welfare gains of capital tax increases for a large fraction of the population, who derives most of its disposable income from net wages. However, due to a positive revenue impact, the same price responses amplify the welfare gains of the very bottom of the income distribution, whose main income source are government transfers. As a consequence, general equilibrium forces may increase the optimal capital tax rate relative to its exogenous price counterpart, contradicting conventional wisdom.

The rise and decline of industrial foundations as controlling owners of Swedish listed firms: the role of tax incentives

ABSTRACTBeginning in the interwar period, industrial foundations became a vehicle for corporate control of large listed firms in Sweden. In the 1990s they were replaced by wealthy individuals who either directly own controlling blocks or who own them through holding companies. We study potential explanations for this change and propose two tax-related candidates: shifts in the relative effective taxation across owner types and the dismantling of inheritance taxation that prevented the generational transfer of the ownership of large controlling blocks. We exploit newly computed marginal effective capital income tax rates across capital owners, accounting for all relevant factors, including rules governing tax exemptions. We show that the 1990–91 tax reform, abolition of the wealth tax for controlling owners in 1997, 2003 tax exemption of dividends and capital gains on listed stock for holding companies with a voting or equity share of at least 10 percent, and abolition of the inheritance and gift taxes in 2004 reversed the rules of the game. Recently, control has largely been wielded through direct ownership, and the role of foundations is rapidly declining. These findings point to the importance of tax incentives for the use of foundations as the control vehicle of listed firms.

Políticas Fiscais para Estabilização da Dívida Pública: uma abordagem de equilíbrio geral aplicada ao Brasil

Resumo Usamos um modelo de equilíbrio geral aplicado dinâmico e determinístico com um agente representativo para avaliar alternativas de política fiscal para o Brasil. As alterações do mix fiscal que mais aumentam o produto per capita de longo prazo (em cerca de 2%) são: a redução do consumo do governo acompanhada pela redução da alíquota do imposto de renda sobre o capital e o aumento do investimento do governo financiado pela redução das transferências. A primeira delas também é a que produz o maior aumento do bem-estar. As estratégias de consolidação da dívida pública consideradas usaram apenas um instrumento fiscal e visaram reduzir a dívida pública em 10% em dez anos e sua estabilização subsequente. Sob o ponto de vista do nível de consumo e do nível do estoque de capital no longo prazo, e do fluxo descontado de bem-estar, o melhor instrumento foi na alíquota do imposto de renda sobre o capital. Sob a ótica do produto no longo prazo, o melhor instrumento foi o investimento do governo, seguido pela alíquota do imposto sobre a renda do capital.

Capital income taxation with housing

This paper quantitatively investigates capital income taxation in the general-equilibrium overlapping generations model with household heterogeneity and housing. Housing tax policy is found to affect how capital income should be taxed, due to substitution between housing and non-housing capital. Given the existing U.S. preferential tax treatment for owner-occupied housing, the optimal capital income tax rate is close to zero (1%), contrary to the high optimal capital income tax rate found with overlapping generations models without housing (31%). A low capital income tax rate improves welfare by narrowing a tax wedge between housing and non-housing capital; the narrowed tax wedge indirectly nullifies the subsidies (taxes) for homeowners (renters) and corrects over-investment to housing. Naturally, when the preferential tax treatment for owner-occupied housing is eliminated, a high capital income tax rate improves welfare as in the model without housing.

Redistributive Capital Taxation Revisited

This paper shows that capital-skill complementarity provides a quantitatively significant rationale to tax capital for redistributive governments. The optimal capital income tax rate is 60%, which is significantly higher than the optimal rate of 48% in an identically calibrated model without capital-skill complementarity. The skill premium falls from 1.9 to 1.67 along the transition following the optimal reform in the capital-skill complementarity model, implying substantial indirect redistribution from skilled to unskilled workers. These results show that a government that cares about redistribution should take into account capital-skill complementarity in production when setting the tax rate on capital income.