Increase In Marginal Tax Rate Research Articles

Pareto-improving reforms of tax deductions

We analyze Pareto-efficient tax deduction rules for work-related expenses. Pareto efficiency dictates a strict rule for marginal deductions along the income distribution. An immediate implication is a recipe for designing Pareto-improving reforms. We apply our theory and simulate a Pareto-improving reform that introduces deductions for non-care household services (housekeeping, gardening, laundry) in the United States. The reform combines marginal deduction rates for household services between 55% and 85% with a slight increase in marginal tax rates.

How Would a Permanently Refundable Child and Dependent Care Credit Affect Eligibility, Benefits, and Incentives?

The federal Child and Dependent Care Credit (CDCC) subsidizes child care costs for working families. Before 2021, the CDCC was nonrefundable, so only families with positive tax liability after other deductions benefited. I estimate how CDCC eligibility, benefits, and marginal tax rates would change if the credit were made permanently refundable. Under refundability, some 5 percent of single parents gain eligibility and receive on average over $1,000 annually. Eligibility increases are largest among Black and Hispanic households. Increases in marginal tax rates among moderate-income taxpayers are small.

Investment Implications of the Rising and Falling Pattern of Marginal Tax Rates for Retirees

This article begins by explaining how income-based increases in Medicare premiums produce dramatic increases in marginal tax rates for retirees with relatively high levels of income. It then explains how the taxation of Social Security benefits causes most lower- and middle-income households to have marginal tax rates for a wide range of income after Social Security benefits begin that are either 150% or 185% of their tax bracket. By combining these two factors, the authors show that most retirees will have marginal tax rates in retirement that rise and fall frequently and sharply as their income increases. This article then explains how this rising and falling pattern of marginal tax rates should affect retired households’ withdrawal strategies from their financial portfolio, where withdrawal strategy is defined broadly to include Roth conversions. TOPICS:Wealth management, retirement, social security Key Findings • Due to income-based increases in Medicare premiums and the taxation of Social Security benefits, most retirees face marginal tax rates that rise and fall sharply as their income rises. • The marginal tax rates for retired households receiving Social Security benefits fall sharply when their income places them beyond the income level where 85% of Social Security benefits is taxable. • We encourage these single and married households to make Roth conversions to take advantage of the relatively low marginal tax rates that exist beyond this income level. However, the amount of funds that can be converted at these relatively low tax rates depends upon whether the household has begun Social Security benefits and whether it will be on Medicare two years hence.

Pareto-Improving Reforms of Tax Deductions

We analyze Pareto-ei¬?cient tax deduction rules for work-related expenses. Pareto efi¬ ciency dictates a strict rule for marginal deductions along the income distribution. An immediate implication is a recipe for designing Pareto-improving reforms. We apply our theory and simulate a Pareto-improving reform that introduces deductions for non-care household services (housekeeping, gardening, laundry) in the United States. The reform combines marginal deduction rates for household services between 55% and 85% with a slight increase in marginal tax rates.

Assessing tax reforms through the elasticity of reported income: an empirical analysis for Spain

ABSTRACTThis paper demonstrates the usefulness of the elasticity of reported income to assess tax reforms from the perspectives of tax revenue and well-being. Employing different identification strategies, evidence is provided of the value of the elasticity of gross reported income in Spain and, based on this elasticity, a detailed assessment is made of the impact of the increase in marginal tax rates which the Spanish government approved in 2012. We use microdata from the Taxpayers Panel of the Institute for Fiscal Studies. The mean value of this elasticity for Spain is 0,363 with considerable heterogeneity depending on taxpayers’ characteristics.

THE FINANCIAL EFFECT OF #FEESMUSTFALL ON INDIVIDUAL TAXPAYERS

The #FeesMustFall campaign evolved from a demand for lower fees for higher education to fee-free higher education in merely two years, necessitating extensive reconsideration of the state budget. Over the same period, marginal tax rate and value added tax (VAT) increases have been felt by South African individual taxpayers. Therefore an exploratory, document analysis has been performed to determine the extent to which the #FeesMustFall campaign has been shifted to the individual taxpayer between the 2015 and 2019 years of assessment. The findings indicate that the demand for increased financial support of students led to the recent VAT and marginal tax rate increases, but that tax revenue is actually declining: the VAT increase has partially covered the increase in social grants to protect the poor from the VAT increase, and the marginal tax rate increase is resulting in reduced growth in tax revenue collection as individual taxpayers are overburdened and therefore, tax avoidance is increasing while productivity is decreasing. The present study provides taxpayers with clarity on the recent tax increases and emphasises to National Treasury that any further tax increase would be to the country’s detriment.

Pareto-Efficient Tax Deductions

We analyze Pareto-efficient tax deduction rules for work-related expenses (e.g. housekeeping services, child care or elderly care). Pareto efficiency dictates a tight rule for how the rate of deductibility should vary with income and expenditures. An immediate implication is a recipe for designing Pareto-improving tax reforms. We apply our theory to housekeeping services in the U.S.: Introducing deduction rules such that between 55% (low expenses) and 85% (high expenses) of housekeeping services can be marginally deducted from taxable income yields a Pareto improvement if combined with a slight increase in marginal tax rates. Nobody is made worse-off and tax revenue increases by 20 Dollars per capita.

Redistributing the gains from trade through progressive taxation

Should a nation's tax system become more progressive as it opens to trade? Does opening to trade change the benefits of a progressive tax system? We answer these question within a standard incomplete markets model with frictional labor markets and Ricardian trade. Consistent with empirical evidence, adverse shocks to comparative advantage lead to labor income losses for import-competition-exposed workers; with incomplete markets, these workers are imperfectly insured and experience welfare losses. A progressive tax system is valuable, as it substitutes for imperfect insurance and redistributes the gains from trade. However, it also reduces the incentives for labor to reallocate away from comparatively disadvantaged locations. We find that optimal progressivity should increase with openness to trade with a ten percentage point increase in openness necessitating a five percentage point increase in marginal tax rates for those at the top of the income distribution.

Tax Shifting and Incentives for Biodiversity Conservation on Private Lands

AbstractConservation in human‐dominated landscapes is challenging partly due to the high costs of land acquisition. We explored a property tax mechanism to finance conservation easements or related contracts as a partial‐property acquisition strategy to meet Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) treaty targets to conserve critically imperiled coastal Douglas fir ecosystems in Canada. To maximize cost‐efficiency, we used systematic planning tools to prioritize 198,058 parcels for biodiversity values, estimated the cost of eliminating property tax on high‐priority parcels to engage land owners in conservation, and then calculated the tax increase on nonpriority parcels necessary to maintain tax revenue. Marginal tax rate increases of 0.13, 0.21, and 0.51% on nonpriority parcels were necessary to offset the elimination of tax revenue on ∼21,000 ha of high‐priority parcels, and potentially sufficient to increase area protection from 9% to 17% to meet CBD targets given uptake rates of 100, 50, or 25%, respectively. Sensitivity analyses suggest uptake rates of 30% to 40% could allow government to achieve a 17% target with 30% of the planning area prioritized for inclusion in a property tax mechanism. Our results suggest prioritizing parcels for biodiversity value and commensurate “tax shifting” may offer an efficient route to conservation on private land.

(How) Do Taxes Affect Capital Structure?

Ignoring the cost of debt in firms’ financing decisions leads to an overstatement of the effect of taxes. Separately identifying the impact of the cost of debt, I find the effect of taxes on firms’ overall debt usage to be insignificant. Rather than influencing the total debt in firms’ capital structure, taxes affect the relative composition of debt. Firms shift from private intermediated debt to public bond debt in response to increases in marginal tax rates. Firms’ debt policy is most sensitive to tax rates in high interest rate environments.

Tax Policy and Firm Entry and Exit Dynamics: Evidence from OECD Countries

In this paper we study the effects of reforms to corporate and personal income taxation on the rate of firm entry and exit using industry data for 19 OECD countries from 1998 to 2005. Using a difference-in-differences approach to correct for endogeneity bias we find that increases in corporate taxation affect entry but not exit. The effects of personal taxation depend upon the marginal tax rate that is altered. Increases in marginal tax rates applied at low income levels negatively affect entry and positively affect exit, whereas marginal tax reforms at higher income levels have the opposite effect.

Compensating Differentials and Income Taxes: Are the Wages of Dangerous Jobs More Responsive to Tax Changes than the Wages of Safe Jobs?

Income taxes distort the relationship between wages and nontaxable amenities. When the marginal tax rate increases, amenities become more valuable as the compensating differential for low-amenity jobs is taxed away. While there is evidence that the provision of amenities responds to taxes, the literature has ignored the consequences for job characteristics which cannot fully adjust. This paper compares the wage response of dangerous jobs to the wage response of safe jobs. When tax rates increase, we should see the pretax compensating differential for on-the-job risk increase. Empirically, I find large differences in the wage response of jobs based on their riskiness.

Compensating Differentials and Income Taxes

Income taxes distort the relationship between wages and nontaxable amenities. When the marginal tax rate increases, amenities become more valuable as the compensating differential for low-amenity jobs is taxed away. While there is evidence that the provision of amenities responds to taxes, the literature has ignored the consequences for job characteristics which cannot fully adjust. This paper compares the wage response of dangerous jobs to the wage response of safe jobs. When tax rates increase, we should see the pretax compensating differential for on-the-job risk increase. Empirically, I find large differences in the wage response of jobs based on their riskiness.

Tax Policy and Firm Entry and Exit Dynamics: Evidence from OECD Countries

In this paper we study the effects of reforms to corporate and personal income taxation on the rate of firm entry and exit using industry data for 19 OECD countries from 1998 to 2005. Using a difference-in-differences approach to correct for endogeneity bias we find that increases in corporate taxation affect entry but not exit. The effects of personal taxation depend upon the marginal tax rate that is altered. Increases in marginal tax rates applied at low income levels negatively affect entry and positively affect exit, whereas marginal tax reforms at higher income levels have the opposite effect.

Heterogeneity in Income Tax Incidence: Are the Wages of Dangerous Jobs More Responsive to Tax Changes than the Wages of Safe Jobs?

Income taxes distort the relationship between wages and non-taxable amenities. When the marginal tax rate increases, amenities become more valuable as the compensating differential for low-amenity jobs is taxed away. While there is evidence that the provision of amenities responds to taxes, the literature has ignored the consequences for job characteristics which cannot fully-adjust. This paper compares the wage response of dangerous jobs to the wage response of safe jobs. When tax rates increase, we should see the pre-tax compensating differential for on-the-job risk increase. Empirically, this paper finds large differences in the wage response of jobs based on their riskiness.

Entrepreneurship and the Policy Environment

Investigates the effects of marginal income tax ratesand bankruptcy exemptions on entrepreneurship rates. After a discussion ofspatial and temporal trends in United States entrepreneurship, an empiricalmodel is used to estimate state rates of entrepreneurship. A state-level paneldata set that covers the period between 1991 and 1998 is used to evaluate themodel. This panel approach reveals a U-shaped relationship between marginal taxrates and entrepreneurship: at low initial tax levels, an increase in marginaltax rates reduces the number of entrepreneurs; at high initial tax levels, thenumber of entrepreneurs rises. Also, an S-shaped relationship exists betweenthe homestead exemption and entrepreneurship. In other words, an increase inthe homestead exemption from very low or very high levels acts to reduce thenumber of entrepreneurs, while an increase in the middle range acts to increasethe number of entrepreneurs. (SAA)

Taxation and household portfolio composition: US evidence from the 1980s and 1990s

This paper explores the relationship between household marginal income tax rates, the set of financial assets that households own, and the portfolio shares accounted for by each of these assets. It analyzes data from the 1983, 1989, 1992, 1995, and 1998 Surveys of Consumer Finances and develops a new algorithm for imputing federal marginal tax rates to households in these surveys. The empirical findings suggest that marginal tax rates have important effects on asset allocation decisions. The probability that a household owns tax-advantaged assets, such as tax-exempt bonds or assets held in tax-deferred accounts, is positively related to its tax rate on ordinary income. In addition, the portfolio share invested in corporate stock, which is taxed less heavily than interest bearing assets, is increasing in the household’s ordinary income tax rate. Holdings of heavily taxed assets, such as interest-bearing accounts, decline as a share of wealth as a household’s marginal tax rate increases.

Analytical and Empirical Evidence of the Impact of Tax Rates on the Trade-off between Debt and Managerial Ownership

We show that, for a firm facing a high marginal tax rate, the benefit of using debt relative to managerial ownership to control agency costs increases at a decreasing rate. Debt and managerial stock ownership represent alternative mechanisms for reducing agency costs of the relationship between owner-investors and managers in firms. However, although debt and managerial ownership provide overlapping benefits, only debt can provide the differential benefit of reducing the firm's tax liability. While the tax benefit from using debt relative to managerial ownership to control agency conflicts is an increasing function of the firm's marginal tax rate, the decreased managerial ownership results in external investors bearing a larger part of the cost of debt that accrues to the firm. Effectively, for external investors, the relative cost of debt decreases at a decreasing rate when the marginal tax rate increases. Therefore, the trade-off between debt and managerial ownership predicted by the agency literature is expected to be strong at low marginal tax rates, but get progressively weaker at higher marginal tax rates. In this paper, we build an analytical model of this hypothesis and provide strong empirical evidence in its support. Our study contributes to a further understanding of how tax rates might affect the interaction of capital structure decisions with the incentive compatibility issues and corporate governance. The study also provides a basis for future studies to examine factors other than tax rates that differentially affect debt and managerial ownership costs.

Taxation of Labor Income and the Demand for Risky Assets

This article analyzes the effect of labor income risk on the joint saving/portfolio‐composition problem. Given decreasing absolute prudence, we find that even when labor income risk increases overall saving, it tends to lower investment in a risky asset. Applying the theory to public finance, we argue that realistic increases in marginal tax rates on labor can cause large enough reductions in after‐tax labor income risk to cause significant increases in risky investment.

Analytical and Empirical Evidence of the Effect of Tax Rates on the Trade-Off Between Debt and Managerial Ownership

We show that, for a firm facing a high marginal tax rate, the benefit of using debt relative to managerial ownership to control agency costs increases at a decreasing rate. Debt and managerial stock ownership represent alternative mechanisms for reducing agency costs of the relationship between owner-investors and managers in firms. However, although debt and managerial ownership provide overlapping benefits, only debt can provide the differential benefit of reducing the firm's tax liability. While the tax benefit from using debt relative to managerial ownership to control agency conflicts is an increasing function of the firm's marginal tax rate, the decreased managerial ownership results in external investors bearing a larger part of the cost of debt that accrues to the firm. Effectively, for external investors, the cost of debt decreases at a decreasing rate when the marginal tax rate increases. Therefore, the trade-off between debt and managerial ownership predicted by the agency literature is expected to be strong at low marginal tax rates, but get progressively weaker at higher marginal tax rates. In this paper, we build an analytical model of this hypothesis and provide strong empirical evidence in its support. Our study contributes to a further understanding of how tax rates might affect the interaction of capital structure decisions with the incentive compatibility issues and corporate governance. The study also provides a basis for future studies to examine factors other than tax rates that differentially affect debt and managerial ownership costs.