Fiscal Externalities Research Articles

Optimal Deposit Insurance

This paper studies the optimal determination of deposit insurance (DI) when bank runs are possible. In a variety of environments, the welfare impact of changes in the level of deposit insurance coverage exclusively depends on three sufficient statistics: the sensitivity of the likelihood of bank failure with respect to the level of DI, the utility gain induced by preventing the marginal bank failure, which can be expressed in terms of the drop in depositors' consumption, and the direct social cost of intervention in bank failure scenarios, which can be expressed in terms of the probability of bank failure, the marginal cost of public funds, and the mass of partially insured depositors. The same expression applies a) when banks face perfect ex-ante regulation and b) when banks are not allowed to react to policy changes. Under imperfect regulation, because banks do not internalize the fiscal impact of their actions, changes in the behavior of banks induced by varying the level of DI (often referred to as moral hazard) only affect the level of optimal DI directly through a fiscal externality, but not independently. We characterize the wedges that determine the optimal ex-ante regulation, which map to liability-side regulation (e.g., deposit insurance premia) and asset-side regulation. Finally, we explore the quantitative implications of our approach through a direct measurement exercise and a model simulation.

Local Policy Choice: Theory and Empirics

This paper critically surveys the growing literature on the policy choices of local governments. First, we identify various reasons for local government policy interactions, including fiscal competition, bidding for firms, yardstick competition, expenditure spillovers, and Tiebout sorting. We discuss theoretically what parameters should be estimated to determine the reason for competition among local governments. We emphasize how the policy outcomes emerging from this competition are affected by the presence of constraints imposed by higher-level governments. Second, we integrate theoretical and empirical analyses on the effects of fiscal decentralization on mobility, spillovers, fiscal externalities, economic outcomes, and distributional issues. Third, we identify key issues that arise in the empirical estimation of strategic interactions among local governments and highlight recent quasi-experimental evidence that has attempted to identify the mechanism at work. Finally, a synthesis model, containing multiple mechanisms and fiscal instruments, resolves some puzzles and provides guidance for future research.

Migration and Fiscal Externality: Us vs. Europe

Migration and Fiscal Externality: Us vs. Europe

Local Policy Choice: Theory and Empirics

This paper critically surveys the growing literature on the policy choices of local governments. First, we identify various reasons for local government policy interactions, including fiscal competition, bidding for firms, yardstick competition, expenditure spillovers, and Tiebout sorting. We discuss theoretically what parameters should be estimated to determine the reason for competition among local governments. We emphasize how the policy outcomes emerging from this competition are affected by the presence of constraints imposed by higher-level governments. Second, we integrate theoretical and empirical analyses on the effects of fiscal decentralization on mobility, spillovers, fiscal externalities, economic outcomes, and distributional issues. Third, we identify key issues that arise in the empirical estimation of strategic interactions among local governments and highlight recent quasi-experimental evidence that has attempted to identify the mechanism at work. Finally, a synthesis model, containing multiple mechanisms and fiscal instruments, resolves some puzzles and provides guidance for future research.

The Impact of Migration Controls on Urban Fiscal Policies and the Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital in China

Using newly available data, we document that internal migrants do not enjoy the same access to local public goods and services as city residents in China. We estimate a spatial overlapping generations model with heterogeneous households to quantify the impact of the Hukou system on urban fiscal policies and access to educational opportunities. We find that migrants provide large fiscal externalities to all major cities. We show the feasibility of alternative internal migration policies that offer the potential of decreasing the inequality within China while at the same time increasing the overall level of human capital in the economy.

Unemployment Benefit Duration and Startup Success

Despite the importance of business creation for the economy and a relevant share of new firms being started out of unemployment, most research has focused on analyzing the effect of unemployment insurance (UI) policies on reemployment outcomes that ignore self-employment. In this paper, we assess how UI benefit duration affects the motivation for creating a startup while unemployed and the subsequent firms’ success. To do so, we create a comprehensive dataset on founders in Germany that links administrative social insurance with survey data. Exploiting reform- and age-based exogenous variations in potential benefit duration (PBD) within the German UI system, we find that longer PBD leads to longer actual unemployment duration for those becoming self-employed. Furthermore, the UI duration elasticity for these individuals is higher than common estimates for those individuals becoming re-employed. With increasing unemployment benefit duration, the founders’ outcomes in terms of self-assessed motivation, sales, and employment growth lessen. This overall causal effect of PBD can be rationalized with a mix of composition and individual-level duration effects. Therefore, our findings suggest that it is important to consider the fiscal externality of UI on startup success when it comes to the (optimal) design of UI systems.

Are Moderate Leviathans Harmful to Tax Coordination?

This paper investigates how the sustainability of partial tax coordination between several governments is affected when the governments' objective function is moderate Leviathan in that policymakers are neither entirely benevolent nor fully self-interested. We show that partial tax coordination is more likely to prevail when moderate Leviathan-type governments become more revenue-maximizing Leviathans. In this case, the increased intensity of fiscal externality due to different tax rates makes partial tax coordination more sustainable at the cost of the tax union member countries' well-being.

Decentralization with porous borders: public production in a federation with tax competition and spillovers

We analyze the strategic interaction of regional and federal governments using a model that includes fiscal externalities in the form of inter-regional capital tax competition and technical externalities in the form of inter-regional spillovers. The federal government aims to correct for these inefficiencies using a transfer system. If the regional governments are policy leaders (such that federal policy is set conditional on regional choices), they will internalize both fiscal and technical externalities but free-ride on the transfer system. Efficiency can be achieved by introducing a second transfer scheme that is independent of regional public production. If the federal government sets its policy first and can commit itself to it, the outcome is efficient only if matching grants are used that are financed outside of the transfer system.

Externalities and Benefit Design in Health Insurance

Abstract Insurance benefit design has important implications for consumer welfare. In this article, we model insurer behaviour in the Medicare prescription drug coverage market and show that strategic private insurer incentives impose a fiscal externality on the traditional Medicare program. We document that plans covering medical expenses have more generous drug coverage than plans that are only responsible for prescription drug spending, which translates into higher drug utilization by enrolees. The effect is driven by drugs that reduce medical expenditure and treat chronic conditions. Our equilibrium model of benefit design endogenizes plan characteristics and accounts for asymmetric information; the model estimates confirm that differential incentives to internalize medical care offsets can explain disparities across plans. Counterfactuals show that strategic insurer incentives are as important as asymmetric information in determining benefit design.

How Responsive are Firms to the Corporate Wealth Tax?

The corporate wealth tax is commonly associated with a non-optimal policy in terms of fiscal revenue and efficiency. However, there is no empirical evidence regarding the behavioral response of firms to this tax. By using a bunching methodology, which takes advantage of the non-linearities introduced by the tax design in Colombia, this paper estimates the elasticity of corporate wealth with respect to the statutory tax rate. Results indicate that, in the years when the tax is in force, we observe between 23.8% and 35.7% more firms at the wealth cutoffs where the tax rate changes. This implies estimated elasticities of 0.250 and 0.296 for firms with wealth around 3 billion pesos, which points out negative and inelastic responses of firms' wealth when facing an increase in the statutory tax rate. Absent fiscal externalities, the estimated elasticities are associated with a revenue loss and marginal deadweight loss of around 1% of fiscal revenue on the evaluated taxpayer firms.

Vertical Fiscal Externalities and Federal Tax-Transfers under Variable Factor Supplies

Abstract Within a model of variable supply of capital due to international mobility and variable labor supply due to endogenous labor-leisure choice, we revisit the issues of vertical fiscal externalities, and of federal tax-transfers. Capital and labor taxes by federal and state governments finance the provision of federal and of state public consumption goods. When capital and labor are substitutes in production, we show that (i) the state’s optimal policy calls for capital and labor taxes, (ii) the vertical fiscal externality can be reversed from negative, implying inefficiently high noncooperative capital taxes, to positive, implying inefficiently low noncooperative capital taxes, and (iii) under centralized leadership the federal government replicates the second best optimum with a capital tax, and possibly, top-down transfers. (JEL codes: F18, F21, H21).

The Fiscal Externalities of Charter Schools: Evidence from North Carolina

A significant criticism of the charter school movement is that funding for charter schools diverts money away from traditional public schools. The magnitude of such adverse fiscal externalities depends in part on the nature of state and local funding policies. In this paper, we examine the fiscal effects of charter schools on both urban and nonurban school districts in North Carolina. We base our analysis on detailed balance sheet information for a sample of school districts that experienced substantial charter growth since the statewide cap on charters was raised in 2011. We find a large and negative fiscal impact in excess of $500 per traditional public school pupil in our one urban school district, which translates into an average fiscal cost of about $3,600 for each student enrolled in charter schools. We estimate comparable to somewhat larger fiscal externalities per charter school pupil for two nonurban districts.

Tax competition, unemployment, and intergovernmental transfers

This paper investigates the relationship among tax competition, the equilibrium efficiency of providing public goods, and intergovernmental transfers, under labor market imperfections. Labor market imperfections cause unemployment-exporting externalities, in addition to fiscal externalities. One of the key points is the unemployment-exporting externality can be either a positive or negative externality. A transfer must internalize these two different externalities to provide public goods efficiently. We consider three specific transfers: tax base equalization, tax revenue equalization, and GDP-based equalization. This paper shows that tax base equalization is more effective than revenue equalization in improving the efficiency of public goods supply if two positive externalities are present. In contrast, tax revenue equalization may be better than tax base equalization if both positive and negative externalities are present. This implies that these two options fail to eliminate the overall external effect in some cases. We demonstrate that in a realistic situation, GDP-based equalization can internalize two different externalities perfectly.

Culture and Taxes

We propose a difference-in-differences strategy to identify the existence of interjurisdictional tax competition. Our strategy rests on differences between desired tax levels determined by culture-specific preferences and equilibrium tax levels determined by fiscal externalities and by preferences. While preferences differ systematically between French-speaking and German-speaking Swiss municipalities, local income tax burdens exhibit smooth spatial gradients. To qualify the empirical evidence, we develop a theoretical model of strategic tax setting by local governments that anticipate the effects of taxes on the per capita income and the median “hedonic” income, two inextricable consequences of the sorting of heterogeneous individuals.

An Estimable Model of Income Redistribution in a Federation: Musgrave Meets Oates

We develop a theory of cross-border income shifting in response to subnational personal taxation in a federation and examine its implications for the excess burden of personal taxes. We show how a properly chosen federal tax rate can offset the fiscal externality between states and facilitate decentralization, even in a heterogeneous federation where unitary taxation is suboptimal. Optimal taxes depend on the elasticities of national tax avoidance and of cross-state tax base shifting. We estimate these elasticities around a tax decentralization reform in Canada, finding both to be empirically relevant. We discuss the implications for optimal federalism. (JEL D31, H21, H23, H24, H26, H71, H77)

The Bavarian Municipal Fiscal Equalization Scheme: Emphasis on Equity Rather than Efficiency

Employing the approach of Albouy (2012), this paper evaluates the efficiency and equity of the municipal fiscal equalization scheme in the federal state of Bavaria in Germany. Calculating a measure reflecting the internalization of fiscal and real externalities by state grants, we conduct a regression analysis on variables describing efficiency and equity criteria. Because the fiscal equalization scheme redistributes revenues toward regions with low realized incomes and a larger population share of low-productivity residents, the scheme satisfies certain equity criteria. However, the fiscal equalization scheme likely does not internalize local public-good externalities and therefore hampers spatial efficiency.

Are Sufficient Statistics Necessary? Nonparametric Measurement of Deadweight Loss from Unemployment Insurance

Central to the welfare analysis of income transfer programs is the deadweight loss associated with possible reforms. To aid analytical tractability, its measurement typically requires specifying a simplified model of behavior. We employ a complementary decomposition approach that compares the behavioral and mechanical components of a policy's total impact on the government budget to study the deadweight loss of two unemployment insurance policies. Experimental and quasi-experimental estimates using state administrative data show that increasing the weekly benefit is more efficient (with a fiscal externality of 53 cents per dollar of mechanical transferred income) than reducing the program's implicit earnings tax.

Optimal Capital Taxation Rates and Tax Competition in Open Economy

The model presented in this paper provides accurate theoretical results regarding optimal taxation rates and fiscal externalities in an open economy. We show that for both capitalimporting and capital-exporting countries, capital taxation rates should increase with country size approximated by its capital stock. In parallel, for the smallest countries, the fiscal weight could be very high and strongly relies on the labor production factor. It is also demonstrated that the optimal capital taxation rate increases with the relative preference of the representative consumer for private consumption, in contrast to public consumption, as well as with the capital share in the production function. Furthermore, the presented model shows that the slope of the tax reaction function is positive as soon as the preference of the representative consumer for private goods consumption is sufficiently high.

Regional Tax Externality and Competition: Empirical Study in Early Decentralization Era of East Java Province

<p>This paper concerned with the empirical study about tax competition among regions which in a theoretical point of view, tax competition is seen as an economic policy strategy to attract mobile tax bases and firms in order to boost economic development in terms of employment and output growth within the political jurisdiction implementing it. Using a panel of more 400 observed district and municipal inEast Java. It provides empirical evidence on how the local tax as well as the retribution in the neighborhood affect the local tax. The results support the existence of fiscal externalities: an increase in the tax and retribution of local neighbors exerts a positive effect on the local tax which is shown by spatial weighting variable both tax and retribution. Several factors that are hypothesized affect local tax also significant to determine local tax, these factors such as original regional income, and regional domestic product as a proxy of income.</p><p> </p>

Competitive selection, trade, and employment: The strategic use of subsidies

AbstractWithin a heterogeneous‐firms model with endogenous labor supply, intra‐industry competitive selection is shown to affect the impact of wage (and entry) subsidies. Optimal uniform wage subsidies are always positive even though, by reducing industry selectivity, they lower average productivity. Because of international selection and fiscal externalities, noncooperative policies entail under‐subsidization of wages. Targeted (domestic‐only or export) wage subsidies are dominated from a welfare point of view by a uniform subsidy. While always having an opposite effect on average productivity, an optimal entry subsidy is shown to be less effective than an optimal uniform wage subsidy in raising employment and welfare.