Capital Tax Rate Research Articles

The Ramsey steady-state conundrum in heterogeneous-agent economies

This paper makes two fundamental contributions: (i) We prove that the interior Ramsey steady state commonly assumed in the literature may not exist in a standard Aiyagari model—in particular, a steady state with the modified golden rule and a positive capital tax is shown to be feasible but not optimal under conventional parameter values for the intertemporal elasticity of substitution. (ii) We design a modified, analytically tractable version of the standard Aiyagari model to reveal the necessary and/or sufficient conditions for the existence of a Ramsey steady state. We characterize the basic properties of both interior and non-interior Ramsey steady states and show that researchers may draw fundamentally misleading conclusions about optimal fiscal policy (such as the optimal capital tax rate) from their analysis if an interior Ramsey steady state is incorrectly assumed.

Economic Globalization, Taxation and Public Expenditures: Evidence From OECD Countries

Globalization shapes the fiscal policies of countries, leading to changes in the structure of taxation and public expenditures. According to the theory of international tax competition, as globalization increases, countries use their tax policies to attract more mobile factors, resulting in tax competition. This competition causes capital tax rates to decrease and labor tax rates to increase, which is known as the efficiency effect of globalization. On the other hand, governments expand the welfare state to compensate for the increased economic risks resulting from globalization. This is known as the compensation effect of globalization. The purpose of this paper is to empirically test these hypotheses using a dataset of 26 OECD countries from the period 1990-2020. The study employed the Driscoll-Kraay estimator, which produces reliable estimates with robust standard errors in the presence of heteroscedasticity, autocorrelation, and cross-sectional dependency issues. The results indicate that economic globalization has a negative effect on corporate tax rates and a positive effect on labour tax rates. Additionally, it was observed that a high level of social spending is linked to an increase in economic globalization. These results emphasise that the efficiency effect and the compensation effect coexist and complement each other rather than being rivals.
 Key words: Globalization, tax competition, public expenditure, panel data 
 JEL Classification: E15, E62, C23

Convergence of shadow economy across U.S. states

ABSTRACT Using a novel shadow economy measure constructed from a two-sector dynamic deterministic general equilibrium model, this paper provides the first piece of evidence on the convergence dynamics of the shadow economy at the U.S. state level over the period 1999–2019. The result of the panel club convergence test demonstrates the absence of absolute convergence but also identifies the presence of six club memberships without an apparent regional conglomeration. Further analysis based on the ordered logit regression uncovers that factors such as gross state product, the share of higher education, government size, the share of union participation, capital tax rate, institutional quality, and unemployment rate significantly influence the club membership of the shadow economy. Understanding these findings is imperative for developing policies to curtail the spread of shadow economies across the states in the U.S.

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.

Pareto-Improving Optimal Capital and Labor Taxes

We study optimal fiscal policy in a model with agents who are heterogeneous in their labor productivity and wealth, and there is an upper bound on the capital tax rate each period. We focus on Pareto-improving plans. We show that the optimal tax reform is to cut labor taxes and leave capital taxes high in the short and medium run. Only in the very long run would capital taxes be zero. For our calibration labor taxes should be low for the first eleven to twenty-six years, while capital taxes should be at their maximum. This policy ensures that all agents benefit from the tax reform and that capital grows quickly after the reform. Therefore, the long-run optimal tax mix is the opposite of the short- and medium-run one. The initial labor tax cut is financed by deficits, which lead to a positive level of government debt in the long run, reversing the standard prediction that the government accumulates savings in models with optimal capital taxes. The welfare benefits from the tax reform are high and can be shifted entirely to capitalists or workers by varying the length of the transition.

Financial globalization and wage inequality

AbstractThis paper analyzes how financial globalization affects skilled‐unskilled wage inequality. We treat financial globalization as more regions being integrated into the global financial market. We find that a higher degree of financial globalization will decrease skilled‐unskilled wage inequality if it induces a small increase in the capital tax rate. However, a higher degree of financial globalization will increase skilled‐unskilled wage inequality if it induces a big increase in the capital tax rate.

Tax competition versus tax coordination in a multi-region endogenous growth model with an integrated capital market

This paper analyzes tax competition and coordination, determining which is better in a multi-region endogenous growth model. With an integrated capital market, increased capital tax in one region generates external benefits to others through an increased tax base originating from capital flight. Because this efficiency cost affects resource allocation between private and public goods and intertemporal consumption and investment choice, a higher cost derives a lower equilibrium capital tax rate, leading to a higher economic growth rate. Consequently, the inefficiency costs exert two opposite welfare effects via inefficiently low public goods supply and high economic growth. Naturally, tax coordination to cope with severe tax competition is welfare improving to resolve the underprovision of public goods instead of accepting low growth. In contrast, tax coordination is not desirable if tax competition is mild because benefits from high growth outweigh the costs of an undersupply of public goods.

Home Production: Does It Matter for the Korean Macroeconomy during the COVID-19 Pandemic?

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a tremendous influence on many aspects of life in Korea. Some people have had to relocate their workplaces from factories or offices to their homes in order to stop the spread of the virus. This paper examines the effects of home production on the Korean macroeconomy during the COVID-19 pandemic. Then, the impulse response function is used to perform an empirical analysis. The results show that total output, market goods consumption, investment, capital, and market work hours all decline as a consequence of a home productivity shock, while home goods consumption, wages, transfer payments, and home work hours all increase. Moreover, using fiscal policies such as lowering the capital tax rate and increasing the fiscal deficit, the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Korean macroeconomy can be improved. Robustness tests are carried out in light of the uneven economic development and different COVID-19 pandemic scenarios inside and outside the Seoul circle. The conclusions of this paper are accurate and reliable, as shown by the results of the robustness test.

Overcoming wealth inequality by capital taxes that finance public investment

Wealth inequality is rising in high-income countries. Can increased public investment financed by higher capital taxes counteract this trend? We examine how such a policy affects the distribution of wealth in a setting with distinct wealth groups: dynastic savers and life-cycle savers. Our main finding is that this policy always decreases wealth inequality when the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor is moderately high. At high capital tax rates, dynastic savers disappear. Below these rates, life-cycle savers gain from the higher public expenditures financed by the higher capital tax rates. We calibrate our model to OECD economies and find a threshold elasticity of 0.82.

Macroeconomic Effects of Capital Tax Rate Changes

We study aggregate, distributional, and welfare effects of a permanent reduction in the capital tax rate in a quantitative model with capital-skill complementarity and household heterogeneity. Such a tax reform leads to expansionary long-run aggregate output and investment effects, but those are coupled with increases in wage, consumption, and income inequality. The tax reform is not self-financing and its effects depend crucially on whether the government cuts lump-sum transfers or raises distortionary labor or consumption tax rates for financing. The former results in a larger aggregate expansion, but at the expense of a greater rise in inequality. As a result, the latter is relatively more beneficial for unskilled households. We find that the tax reform, when the consumption tax rate adjusts, leads to a Pareto improvement in terms of life-time welfare. For transition dynamics, monetary policy, in addition to the fiscal adjustments, matters. In particular, if monetary policy inflates away a portion of the public debt, the economy can avoid the short-run contraction that would arise otherwise.

The Import of Capital Taxes and Environmental Standards Compared To Agglomeration on Capital Flow

The effect of competition for mobile capital on local (jurisdictional) policy making is critical to the fiscal-environmental federalism literature. This existing body of literature, however, is deficient in examinations of how influential local policy levers, environmental standards and taxation, compare with fundamental capital location determinants like agglomeration forces. The purpose of this investigation is to broaden the agglomeration augmented interjurisdictional competition model to effectively compare local policy and agglomeration influences on capital flow. When jurisdictions do not have access to forms of taxation that allow for the efficiency of public goods provision, agglomeration forces notably impact fiscal policy weight. Herein, the magnitude of agglomeration directly effects the determination of the capital tax rate which in turn influences the provision of public goods. Subsequent inefficient public goods provision will distort the local choice of environmental standards. The capital tax must be complimented by 'benefit' taxation to finance efficient public expenditure. Interestingly, when public goods are provided efficiently, the capital tax doubles as a Pigovian remedy and a subsidy instrument depending, largely, on the strength of agglomeration forces.

Unemployment, tax competition, and tax transfer policy

AbstractThe reduction of capital tax rates witnessed over the past two decades has been motivated by the wish to boost investment and reduce unemployment. Previous models of tax competition have explored the consequences for capital allocation in great detail, but have mostly been silent on the employment effects due to the assumption of a perfect labor market. To address the impact of tax competition on employment and public good provision, this paper reconsiders the analysis in the presence of a labor market imperfection that generates unemployment. We incorporate a wage rigidity and intergovernmental transfers financed by the labor income tax into the standard tax competition model to explore the outcome of federal–state policy interaction. The key factors in determining the efficiency are the capital–labor substitutability/complementary and the cost of the efficient level of public good supply relative to the ability of the labor income to generate revenue. When the labor income tax is insufficient for financing, there can only be efficiency if the aggregate externality is negative—but this outcome is only one of multiple equilibria. We also show that federal government leadership is effective to provide public goods efficiently by state governments if capital and labor are substitutes.

Optimal capital taxation in an economy with innovation-driven growth

AbstractThis paper investigates optimal capital taxation in an innovation-driven growth model. We examine how the optimal capital tax rate varies with externalities associated with R&D and innovation. Our results show that the optimal capital tax rate is higher when (i) the “stepping on toes effect” is smaller, (ii) the “standing on shoulders effect” is stronger, or (iii) the extent of creative destruction is smaller. The optimal capital tax rate is more likely to be positive when there is underinvestment in R&D. Moreover, the optimal capital tax rate and the monopolistic markup exhibit an inverted-U relationship. By calibrating our model to the US economy, we find that the optimal capital tax rate is positive, at a rate of around 6.6%. Finally, we consider a number of extensions and find that the result of a positive optimal capital tax is robust.

How to Tax Different Incomes?

We study the optimal tax system when taxpayers earn different kinds of income by supplying different inputs. Imperfect substitution between inputs allows for general equilibrium effects. We consider any type of cross-base responses to tax changes such as income-shifting. Formalizing the tax schedule as the sum of many one-dimensional schedules, we express optimal marginal tax rate on any kind of income in terms of sufficient statistics, including new ones for cross-base responses and general equilibrium effects. We also identify the conditions under which making the personal income tax marginally more schedular is socially desirable. The comprehensive and schedular (dual, in particular) income taxes being recurring proposals in the public debate, we derive sufficient conditions under which each form of tax is optimal. We stress how empirically restrictive these conditions are. Using a new algorithm on French tax return data, we characterize the optimal combination of a nonlinear tax schedule on personal income and a linear tax rate on capital income. We find that one should include, without any deduction, all income sources in the personal income base and subsidize the source of income which is more elastic. We find that crossbase responses have little effects on the personal nonlinear income tax schedule but increases by 5.9 to 6.9 percentage points the capital tax rate. General equilibrium effects also increases this tax rate by around 4.5 percentage points.

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.

Dynamic Pre-distributive Capital Tax Design with Raising Skill Premium

This paper studies optimal dynamic capital taxation under the progress of skill-biased technologyand finds a novel reason for taxing capital. We demonstrate that the optimal capital tax rate can be expressed as a function of time-invariable social welfare weights and a time-variable (a) skill premium,(b) utility elasticity of labor, and (c) Hicks elasticity of complementarity between period consumptionand leisure. While the optimal capital tax in the second period replicates Stiglitz (2018)’s finding, the optimal capital tax in the periods following the second period is quite different. It is determined bythe intertemporal changes of items (a) to (c) instead of the current values of (a) to (c). In particular, supposing that the taxpayers are labor averse and that there is complementarity between period con-sumption and leisure, the optimal capital tax is positive when the skill premium is rising. This is true even if the skill premium is not endogenous to capital input.

Overreaction to Capital Taxation in Saving Decisions

We study the response of saving decisions to two alternative capital taxation, i.e., wealth tax and capital income tax. We conduct an online “life-cycle” experiment on Amazon Mturk, where subjects make dynamic saving decisions. Subjects exhibit an overreaction to the wealth tax, not to the capital income tax: the subject saves significantly less with the introduction of wealth tax than with a financially equivalent drop in capital return. Furthermore, we build a parsimonious behavioral model of individual optimization to characterize the overreaction. Finally, to quantitatively illustrate the policy implication of overreaction for optimal capital taxation analysis, we use the same model and calibration as the seminal study of Conesa et al. (2009), but modified it to allow for behavioral overreaction. The results show that a larger overreaction bias generates more welfare loss for the economy. The optimal capital tax rate decreases as households overreact more to capital taxation.

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.

How to Tax Different Incomes?

We study the optimal tax system when taxpayers earn different kinds of income by supplying different inputs. Imperfect substitution between inputs allows for general equilibrium effects. We consider any type of cross-base responses to tax changes such as income-shifting. Formalizing the tax schedule as the sum of many one-dimensional schedules, we express optimal marginal tax rate on any kind of income in terms of sufficient statistics, including new ones for cross-base responses and general equilibrium effects. We also identify the conditions under which making the personal income tax marginally more schedular is socially desirable. The comprehensive and schedular (dual, in particular) income taxes being recurring proposals in the public debate, we derive sufficient conditions under which each form of tax is optimal. We stress how empirically restrictive these conditions are. Using a new algorithm on French tax return data, we characterize the optimal combination of a nonlinear tax schedule on personal income and a linear tax rate on capital income. We find that one should include, without any deduction, all income sources in the personal income base and subsidize the source of income which is more elastic. We find that crossbase responses have little effects on the personal nonlinear income tax schedule but increases by 5.9 to 6.9 percentage points the capital tax rate. General equilibrium effects also increases this tax rate by around 4.5 percentage points.