We characterize optimal individual tax evasion and avoidance when taxpayers "narrow bracket" the joint avoidance/evasion decision by exhausting all gainful methods for legal avoidance before choosing whether or not also to evade illegally. We find that (1) evasion is an increasing function of the audit probability when the latter is low enough, yet tax avoidance is always decreasing in the probability of audit; (2) an analogous finding to the so-called Yitzhaki puzzle for evasion also holds for tax avoidance—an increase in the tax rate decreases the level of avoided income and the level of avoided tax; and (3) that, holding constant the expected return to evasion, it is not always the case that the combined loss of reported income due to avoidance and evasion can be stemmed by increasing the fine rate and decreasing the audit probability.
Tax evasion by small businesses can be tackled using different approaches. A traditional one recommends to increase the probability of an audit that is perceived by small businesses. Clearly, this entails high administrative and compliance costs. Another possibility is to reduce the room for accounting manipulation by applying more stringent accounting standards. This article uses a panel of administrative data concerning 71,000 Italian small businesses observed in tax years 2005 to 2008. The aim of this article is to evaluate the impact of a reform implemented in 2006. Until 2005, small businesses adopting more stringent accounting standards were granted a special audit regime such that the probability to be audited was particularly low. This regime was repealed in 2006. It is shown that the reform increased profits and turnover, as reported by the subset of businesses that were more likely to perceive the reform as an increase in the probability of an audit.
An important concern to the efficiency of public finance systems is that voters may suffer from various "fiscal illusions" that can be exploited by politicians to grow the public sector. This article contributes evidence on the specific public financial management mechanisms by associating the impact property reassessments have on the "visibility" of budget size signaled by property tax rates. Using data from Virginia cities and counties from 2001 to 2011, the results indicate mass reappraisals, which reduce property tax visibility cause contemporaneous property tax levy increases, as do reappraisals that increase future tax visibility. These revenue shocks are then smoothed into expenditures through the management of assets, indicating policy makers prefer the spending to be drawn from future cash reserves than immediate projects that might draw attention to the source of fiscal illusion.
State tax reform is fundamentally different than federal tax reform. States are continually modifying their taxes to meet revenue challenges and to cope with the changing structure of the national and regional economy. Most state tax reforms are modest affairs and not major rewrites of the tax codes. Reforms must consider the existing institutional structure of the state, economic policies, and the politics of the current state situation. Nonetheless, there are some common themes in reforms across the states, including expanding the sales tax base to include services, and broadening the base for income taxation.
We investigate the relationship between economic freedom and black versus white entrepreneurship rates. An extensive literature examines why black entrepreneurship rates lag behind white, focusing on socioeconomic characteristics, intergenerational knowledge transfers, work experience, and credit access. Another literature examines how regulations affect entrepreneurial behavior, finding that a more heavily regulated economy deters start-ups. We combine these literatures and use the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity and the Economic Freedom of North America Index to examine whether state-level variation in economic freedom causes differences in entrepreneurial behavior across races. Overall, we find that blacks and whites differ in their entrepreneurial response to public policy. One interesting finding is that more economically free labor markets, due primarily by a lower minimum wage, diminish black entrepreneurship but does not affect whites. This is important if an unintended consequence of the minimum wage is to reduce black entrepreneurship, thereby increasing the black–white entrepreneurship gap.
Using rich Swedish administrative panel data, we are able to observe and analyze a specific type of tax noncompliance, namely, overstatement of a self-reported dividend allowance that can reduce shareholders’ tax liability. Some 3 percent of Swedish owner managers overstate this allowance during the period 2006 to 2009. Exploiting a large kink in the income tax schedule, we identify a positive and significant effect of the income tax rate on noncompliance. The estimated elasticity of noncompliance with respect to the marginal tax rate ranges from .5 to .7, depending on the specification.
This article uses the longitudinal aspect of the Health and Retirement Study to explore the characteristics associated with reversals in retirement (referred to here as "unretirement"). Through the use of survival-time analysis with time-variant covariates, this article shows that health insurance status and its source are significant predictors of unretirement decisions. The relationship is important, as the potential impacts of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) are considered. The analysis finds that insurance is equally as predictive of retirement reversals as other financial explanations such as pensions and wealth at retirement. The analysis also shows that health insurance sources play a particularly predictive role for early retirees and those who were previously open to the idea of working in retirement. Rough estimates suggest that the ACA might reduce the number of reversals by between two and four percentage points, which would translate to 80,000 and 170,000 retirees annually.
This study examines the time to adoption of municipal local option sales taxes (LOSTs) in Texas from 1967 to 2012. General-purpose LOSTs were introduced in 1968 and were the only LOSTs available to local governments until 1988, when four earmarked LOSTs were permitted for municipalities. Counties and special districts were also allowed to adopt LOSTs beginning in 1988. Using a Cox proportional hazard model and a variation that allows for repeating events, this study finds that proximity to major highways and state and national borders and LOST rates within and around a municipality affect time to adoption.
We analyze how spillover effects may affect the choice of a federal tax rate in a federal country with vertical tax externalities. Our main result shows the conditions under which the federal tax rate with spillover effects is lower or higher than the federal tax rate without spillover effects. The effects of vertical tax externalities can be modified by the reaction of the federal government to the horizontal externality due to spillover effects.
This article investigates the relationships among slavery, economic freedom, and economic development across former slave-exporting states in Africa, using country-level slave export data from Nunn, the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World index, and per capita real gross domestic product (GDP) from the Maddison Project database. Recent studies document a negative link between slavery and present-day income. This study takes an additional step, aiming to connect slavery, institutions, and economic performance by testing whether the early institutions of slavery work through current institutions to affect modern incomes. I attempt to support this relationship using slave exports as an instrument for institutions in two-stage least squares income regressions. Results demonstrate a strong, positive relationship between economic freedom and present-day income. Further, based on tests of overidentifying restrictions, I cannot safely reject instrument validity. These findings, taken together, suggest that institutions likely serve as a conduit for the influence of slavery on incomes today.
There has been much study of the consequences of economic freedom but, outside of the role of political institutions, there has been little study of the determinants of economic freedom. We investigate whether religion affects economic freedom. Our cross-sectional data set includes 137 countries averaged over the period 2001–2010. Simple correlations show that Protestantism is associated with economic freedom, Islam is not, with Catholicism in between. The Protestant ethic requires economic freedom. Our empirical estimates, which include religiosity, political institutions, and other explanatory variables, confirm that Protestantism is most conducive to economic freedom.
In order to reduce the volatility of the personal income tax in Utah, review and reform efforts recommended a simple flat tax that disallowed all deductions or exemptions. Among the reasons for the recommended flat tax was the argument that it would result in a more stable year-over-year tax revenue stream. This was especially important for education financing. The tax system that was finally adopted retained exemptions and deductions through a tax credit. Using a series of simulations based on twenty-one years of tax returns, we establish that by retaining exemptions and deductions, tax reform efforts failed to appreciably reduce the volatility of personal income tax revenues. These simulations also show that the initially proposed flat income tax with no exemptions or deductions would have decreased volatility at the cost of reducing the growth rate. This study contributes insights, caveats, methodology, and potential alternatives for future individual income tax reforms by focusing on the growth and volatility of three different tax systems.
We estimate the net fiscal benefit (NFB) and the fiscal effect of unconditional grants on wages for twenty-six Brazilian states in the period 2005 to 2009. In particular, we explore the analytical framework proposed in Albouy to investigate the efficiency and equity effects of unconditional intergovernmental grants in Brazil. This framework can be understood as a positive exercise to comprehend whether grants mitigate the NFB differences across localities and whether they promote equalization in certain criteria. We explore labor market characteristics such as minimum wage and informality to evaluate efficiency and equity in grant distribution. According to our estimates, workers moving to more productive areas would obtain, on average, Brazilian Reais (BRL$) 0.52 less per year in NFBs on their earnings. Results suggest that unconditional grant policy in Brazil is associated with inefficiency because higher-paying areas with larger shares of formal jobs in metropolitan regions are negative recipients of grants.
Using household-level data from 1980 to 2010, we examine whether economic freedom, as measured by the Economic Freedom of North America Index, has similar effects on white household income as it does on black household income. Our findings suggest that the positive effect of economic freedom found in most studies affects black households less than white households. Further, using the Oaxaca decomposition, our results show that economic freedom is an important factor explaining the gap between black and white household incomes.
State governments have a long history of providing income tax relief to their elderly constituents. Our research investigates the current distributional and revenue effects of these tax breaks, as well as the economic status of the elderly, and explores how these measures have changed since 1990. Using data from the 1990 Integrated Public Use Microdata Series and the 2013 American Community Survey, combined with the TAXSIM calculator, we calculate current state income tax liabilities and revenues and simulate the effects of removing all age-related tax breaks. Our analyses reveal that the economic well-being of the elderly has grown substantially relative to the nonelderly and that state tax breaks primarily benefit the middle- and upper-income elderly. Revenue costs of these tax breaks have also grown substantially, and their modest and mixed effects on income equality, measured by changes in the Gini, cast doubt on equity as a justification.
We consider a proposal that reduces by half the taxes on homesteaded properties and replaces the lost revenue by increasing the base and rate of the state sales tax. We develop a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model and a microsimulation model (MSM) to analyze the economic and welfare effects of such a proposal if adopted in Georgia. The results from the CGE model suggest that the proposed reforms have a substantial negative effect in percentage terms on Georgia’s economy. The MSM suggests that such a policy has no effect on the distribution of consumption by income class but increases the percentage of owner-occupied housing relative to rental housing by 20 percent in the aggregate.
A greater level of government involvement in the financing of health care is generally viewed unfavorably by organizations monitoring economic freedom. However, increased government provision of health insurance could be associated with improved economic freedom through enhanced labor market mobility. For example, job-lock alleviation accompanying a public insurance expansion could lead to increased innovation or a higher likelihood of self-employment. In this article, we use the Affordable Care Act (ACA)’s recent Medicaid expansions to examine the effect of an increase in public health insurance provision on labor market outcomes by gender and race/ethnicity. Our results lend support to the notion that state Medicaid expansions are associated with improved labor market autonomy for white men and white women; however, we find mixed results for black and Hispanic men and women. Notably, our findings cast doubt on earlier claims that the ACA would lead to large reductions in labor force participation and employment.
We investigate the price effect of an excise tax in a duopoly setting. Previous studies have considered the Cournot and Bertrand models but ignore the Cournot–Bertrand model in which one firm competes in output and the other firm competes in price. This omission is important because Cournot–Bertrand behavior is observed in the real world, and the Cournot–Bertrand model provides dramatically different results. Unlike in the Cournot and Bertrand models, we find that firms in the same industry have different pass-through rates in the Cournot–Bertrand model even when they face identical demand and cost conditions. This provides another reason why tax incidence policy is so complex.
This article provides an empirical analysis of the incentive effects of equalization grants on business and personal income tax rates using panel data from Canadian provinces. We exploit the discontinuity in the equalization grant allocation formula to identify the exogenous income and incentive effects of equalization grants on tax policy. Our empirical results indicate that equalization grants provide provincial governments an incentive to raise their business and personal income tax rates. The results also suggest that if the equalization program in its current form was abandoned, then business and personal income tax rates would be lower in the grant receiving provinces.
The issue for this research is whether perception of the rate and amount of fuel taxes paid by an individual influences his or her support for funding highway improvements from any source of revenue. A survey of likely California and Michigan voters demonstrates that they often overestimate the rate of their state’s gasoline excise tax and the subsequent amount they are likely to pay for this tax in a month. Regression analyses show that voter misperceptions concerning the magnitude of state fuel taxes affect their views regarding an increase in funding to support highway investment proposals. A reasonable policy implication is that the adoption of proposals to generate additional funds for highway investment is more likely if accompanied by a campaign identifying the existing rate of the state’s gasoline excise tax and the relatively small amount of this tax paid by the state’s typical driver.
In light of the principle of additionality, the inflow of European Union (EU) funds should complement domestic public funds, which are required to cofinance the investment. EU funds should either be unrelated to fiscal decisions of recipient regions, and as such should not affect taxation choices, or they could imply an increase in taxation to finance the additional domestic funds required by the additionality principle. Empirical results linking fiscal autonomy of Italian regions, considered by looking at the number and the level of average tax rates for the regional surcharge on the personal income tax and committed EU funds, suggest the existence of a significant relationship, even after controlling for relevant economic and political factors. The level of average tax rates is lower the more EU funds are received, as is the complexity of the system, measured by the number of income tax brackets.
This study develops a simple model for analyzing excise tax setting in a competitive framework. Specifically, the model predicts that tax rate competition will vary for different goods based on the relative ease of cross-border shopping. To test the model, this study utilizes a dynamic space-time panel econometric model to quantify the horizontal response function for cigarette, beer, and gasoline tax rates for US states from 1960 to 2007. The empirical findings support the model predictions. Only cigarette tax rates have a horizontal response function statistically different from zero.
Recent events, including the failed recall of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and the Chicago teachers strike, have shed light on the relationship between state fiscal policy and public-sector union power. While a literature has developed focusing on various aspects of the link between public-sector unions and government policy, scholars have yet to reach consensus. In most cases, public-sector unions have multiple tools they can use to influence policy. We find that union political contributions and collective bargaining are associated with higher incomes for state and local employees and with higher public employment, both across state and local governments overall as well as within the education sector. We also find relatively little evidence that union activity influences total spending.
In 1993, the benefit levels of the earned income tax credit (EITC) were changed significantly based on the number of children in the household. Exploiting this policy change and employing a difference-in-differences plus mother fixed effects framework, we find significantly improved home environment quality for children of unmarried mothers, regardless of their race/ethnicity, and lowered probabilities of having accidents and improved mother-rated health for children of married white mothers. Children of unmarried black and Hispanic mothers also had better mother-rated health. Our results provide new evidence of positive spillover effects of the 1993 EITC expansion and therefore have important policy implications.
A growing number of states are pursuing strategies to combat declining fuel tax revenue and fund road construction and maintenance, including the use of sales taxes, income taxes, and tolls; raising fuel tax rates; and adopting road mileage user fees. We use data from a nationally representative survey to compare public acceptability of a mileage user fee with each of these alternative revenue mechanisms. We find that support for the revenue options varies from 13.4 percent for income taxes to 33.8 percent for tolls, with higher gasoline tax rates, mileage user fees, and sales taxes in the middle. The evidence also points to stronger intensity of opposition than intensity of support across all alternatives. Finally, we find that, conditional on opposition to the mileage user fee, public acceptability is highest for tolls, followed by higher fuel taxes, sales taxes, and income taxes. Policy implications are discussed.
In several countries, economic development has boosted the mobility of population, changing the distribution of litigation. Hence, the increasing difference between the new demand of legal services and the old judicial maps has increased processing time and backlog, therefore, badly affecting judiciary efficiency. These issues are particular relevant for the Italian judicial system because of the Italian government’s proposal (decree n. 155/2012) of new judicial map of first instance courts. The courts’ reorganization has been achieved through the horizontal merger of some courts and the abolition of all local courthouses. This article represents the first attempts at measuring the potential performance improvements achieved by the enforced reform. For this purpose, we compare the efficiency levels of Italian first instance courts in 2011 with those reached by the new judicial map. Our results show not negligible efficiency gains from the proposed mergers under the variable returns to scale technology assumption.
Fiscal disparities occur when economic resources and public service needs are not evenly distributed across localities. There are equity concerns associated with fiscal disparities. Using a cost-capacity gap framework and a newly assembled data set, this article is the first study to quantify nonschool fiscal disparities across Connecticut municipalities. It finds significant nonschool fiscal disparities, driven primarily by the uneven distribution of the property tax base while cost differentials also play an important role. State nonschool grants are found to have a relatively small effect in offsetting municipal fiscal disparities. Unlike previous research focused on a single state, this article also conducts a cross-state comparison. It finds that nonschool fiscal disparities in Connecticut are more severe than those in Massachusetts, and nonschool grants in Connecticut are less equalizing than those in Massachusetts. This article’s conceptual framework and empirical approach are generalizable to other states and other countries.
We analyze the Italian personal income tax (PIT) in the light of the different tools available to the government to achieve income redistribution. We focus in particular on three mechanisms: marginal tax rates, deductions, and tax credits. Exploiting an extended version of the standard Pfähler decomposition, we estimate the contribution of each of these three tools to the overall redistributive effect of the PIT using administrative data on more than 1.3 million individual tax returns. Our estimates suggest that more than half of the total PIT redistributive effect is due to the two most important tax credits (the tax credit for employment and the tax credit for retirement income), while the marginal rates schedule contribution is about 40 percent. On the contrary, most of the itemized expenditures do not show any sizable impact on redistribution.
Recently increasing public pressure to contain costs in the health care sector has led many national governments to introduce some type of prospective payment system and reduce the scope of global budgeting. This study investigates the extent to which the reimbursement systems of the Italian hospital sector have an impact on hospitals’ technical efficiency. Because of high variation in the financing and provision of health care services among regions and hospitals, Italy represents an interesting case study to test these effects. A two-stage data envelopment analysis was employed, in which the efficiency scores of all Italian hospitals were first calculated and then regressed on different environmental variables to capture the role of reimbursement systems. The results found a significant impact of the use of diagnostic-related group-based prospective payment systems on hospitals’ efficiency.
Diversity is often thought to create conflict and harm economic institutions. We hypothesize, however, that the impact of diversity on economic institutions is conditional on political institutions, and may be negative in some settings but positive in others, due to differences in the nature of rent seeking in different regimes. To test this hypothesis, we estimate the impact of ethnic and linguistic fractionalization on economic freedom, conditional on the level of political rights. We find that the marginal impact of ethnic and linguistic fractionalization on economic freedom is positive in the most democratic nations and that the marginal impact of ethnic fractionalization is negative in the most autocratic nations. Our results suggest that the nature of the relation between diversity and economic institutions may be more complicated than prior literature conveys.
This article characterizes optimal unemployment insurance (UI) in an economy with endogenous negative duration dependence in hiring rates for the unemployed. The characterization generalizes the standard Baily–Chetty result and is independent of the particular mechanism generating endogenous hiring rates. I find that at the social optimum, UI equates the moral hazard cost with the sum of the insurance benefit and a new externality correction term. The sign of this externality correction term depends, in part, on the responsiveness of hiring rates to the UI benefit. I show how the effect of UI on hiring rates in turn depends on the particular assumptions about firm behavior, considering the cases of employer screening and human capital depreciation models.
We extend the classic Zodrow–Mieszkowski model of tax competition with a public input to the case where there is skilled and unskilled labor. The policy rule governing the optimal provision of the public input contains a new term capturing an equity effect that takes into account the disparity in wages between skilled and unskilled workers. The equity effect can work in the opposite direction of efficiency. Under a coordinated policy reform across countries, total welfare improves unambiguously if the public input is underprovided prior to the reform and a concern for equity enhances the effect of improved efficiency on welfare. However, total welfare may also improve even if the public input is initially overprovided if the improvement in the unskilled wage due to the reform is large enough.
Few would question that the Great Recession and its aftermath have proved challenging for government financial management. This depressed economic environment has renewed interest in research involving the accumulation and use of the unassigned fund balance. In this study, we use data on Florida cities to examine the factors affecting the unassigned fund balance before, during, and after the Great Recession. According to our findings, building and maintaining savings at high levels have become routine for Florida cities, irrespective of their government form and the economic conditions they face. This research also provides evidence that Florida cities adapt their savings accumulation strategy, depending on the level of unassigned fund balance they are targeting. As a result, Florida cities consider different factors when accumulating unassigned fund balance above, rather than within or below, the minimum range suggested by the Government Finance Officers Association.
We investigate the effects of variations in the value of the charitable contribution deduction on nonprofit firm behavior, including exploring for the first time the effects of the tax price of giving on fund-raising. We find that a 1 percent increase in tax subsidies is correlated with a 2.0 percent increase in fund-raising, while the elasticity of real charitable output to changes in tax price is less than one in absolute value for most firms. We derive a new equation for treasury efficiency in the presence of fund-raising and find that while our point estimates still support treasury efficiency, our confidence intervals are wide enough to allow some possibility that the deduction is not cost effective. Further, the modest elasticity of charitable output to tax price implies that tax subsidies can crowd out other revenue sources, such that the efficacy of the subsidy depends on the relative efficiency of these alternative sources.
The literature on decentralization has long asserted that decentralized governance increases public sector allocative efficiency. We offer an indirect test of this hypothesis by examining how decentralized governance affects revealed preferences for public goods. Specifically, we examine the relationship between expenditure decentralization and the functional composition of public expenditures. We hypothesize that higher levels of expenditure decentralization induce agents to demand increased production of publicly provided private goods. We test this hypothesis using an unbalanced panel data set of forty-two developed and developing countries over twenty-two years. Using system Generalized Methods of Moments and Quasi-Maximum Likelihood estimators, we find that expenditure decentralization positively, significantly, and robustly influences the share of education expenditures in consolidated government budgets. We also find evidence to suggest that expenditure decentralization positively influences the share of health expenditures in consolidated government budgets. Decentralized governance appears to alter the composition of public expenditures toward publicly provided private goods.
This article assesses the fiscal implications of the 2012 Greek excise tax reform that involved the adoption of a common tax rate between automotive and heating diesel markets. Based on univariate and system estimation methods on demand models that account for linkages between energy markets, evidence of an elastic heating diesel demand is compared to automotive diesel demand with regard to excise taxation. Limited support of an immediate antiarbitrage effect is found in these diesel markets after the common rate adoption. This is attributed to the significant heating diesel stock accumulation and the longer horizon of relevant tax administration reforms. Ceteris paribus, the budgetary outcome of the 2012 reform is positive during its first year of implementation, evidenced by the higher rate introduced compared to the breakeven rate of 230/1,000 liters simulated in this analysis. Nevertheless, factors like income, weather conditions, and continuing arbitrage influence this outcome negatively.
We use a unique data set containing information from state individual income tax returns, Wisconsin unemployment insurance wage data, and data collected by hand from Wisconsin courthouses to examine the earned income tax credit (EITC) usage by divorced men and women with children. We show that a large percentage of divorced adults with children file tax returns. Moreover, many receive the EITC benefit through the tax system, which results in substantial additional resources for the household. We find little evidence of divorced parents engaging in strategic allocations of their children to maximize EITC claims. We also find that many EITC-eligible low-income parents fail to claim it. A potentially cost-effective way to increase the resources available to low-income working families is to provide easy-to-understand information on child-related provisions in the tax code at the time the court order is established.
Interstate mobility may limit states’ ability to choose their desired tax policies. The forces of agglomeration, however, may allow states more leeway in setting tax rates. Moreover, mobility and agglomeration effects are not uniform for all individuals within a state and may vary significantly across different groups. We explore this heterogeneity by examining the residential location decisions of professional racecar drivers and golfers, which have similar industry characteristics but different levels of agglomeration. Consistent with our theory, we show that tax preferences are a powerful determinant of golfer residential patterns, while agglomeration mitigates much of this effect among racecar drivers. These findings highlight the need to better understand how competition and agglomeration interact when formulating tax policy.
This article attempts to measure tax capacity and tax effort of fourteen major Indian states from 1991–1992 to 2010–2011 using stochastic frontier analysis. It shows that the variation across states in tax effort is wide and increasing over time. While per capita gross state domestic product, literacy rate, and labor force participation have positive association with tax capacity, a greater share of agriculture has negative association. Furthermore, intergovernmental transfers, given tax capacity, have negative association with tax effort of states. Expenditure on debt repayment is also adversely associated with tax effort but to a lower extent than outstanding liabilities. Enactment of Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Act is associated with improvement in states’ tax effort. Both within-state political competition and governance indicators have positive association on tax effort.
This article investigates the relationship between dividend payouts and corporate investment. We find significant heterogeneity in the relationship across firms—heterogeneity that helps reconcile competing results in the literature. Drawing on financial filing data from Compustat, we first broadly replicate the statistically significant negative relationship estimated by Auerbach and Hassett. We show that this relationship does not hold if the variation is restricted to within-firm only. Our null results suggest a relatively precise zero estimate for the mean firm. Next, we investigate heterogeneity in the relationship between dividends and investment. Using quantile regression methods, we find that this negative relationship is concentrated at the top of dividends distribution: only firms from the seventieth percentile and above exhibit a strongly negative relationship, and it is these firms that drive the negative estimates of pooled ordinary least square regressions reported in prior work.
Pissarides and Weber propose using data on income and food consumption for estimating the extent of income underreporting by the self-employed, a group seen to be prone to income underreporting. This paper is the first to investigate the importance of the way in which these households are identified in such analyses. Using household budget data from Estonia, different ways are used to identify households prone to income underreporting and to estimate the extent of the underreporting. The share of unreported income is estimated to be substantially larger when underreporting households are identified using their share of reported business income than when they are identified using their employment status. Further analysis combines the different identification methods and reveals that the employment status provides no information on underreporting when the share of business income is taken into account. The share of reported business income is the most informative indicator of underreporting.
There is an extensive literature on the impact of fiscal decentralization on economic growth, development, and public sector effectiveness. However, the empirical literature on fiscal decentralization has exclusively focused on measuring the finances of elected or "devolved" local governments. Other types of decentralized expenditures, including deconcentrated and delegated expenditures, have been systematically excluded from measurement and analysis in the public finance and development literature. Our analysis considers the extent to which using devolved expenditures as a proxy for all devolved expenditures may have impacted the findings of the empirical literature. We collect comprehensive vertical expenditure profiles for health and education services in twenty-nine developing and transition countries and find that by exclusively focusing on devolution, previous analyses have overlooked two-thirds of local public sector expenditures. By excluding these "nondevolved" decentralized spending, the previous (often inconclusive) empirical analyses are likely to have suffered from omitted-variable bias.
This article uses data from survey questions fielded on the 2011 wave of the Cognitive Economics Study to uncover systematic errors in perceptions of income tax rates. First, when asked about the marginal tax rates (MTRs) for households in the top tax bracket, respondents underestimate the top MTR on wages and salary income, overestimate the MTR on dividend income, and therefore significantly underestimate the currently tax-advantaged status of dividend income. Second, when analyzing the relationship between respondents’ self-reported average tax rates (ATRs) and MTRs, many people do not understand the progressive nature of the federal income tax system. Third, when comparing self-reported tax rates with those computed from self-reported income, respondents systematically overestimate their ATR while reported MTR are accurate at the mean, the responses are consistent with underestimation of tax schedule progressivity.
Recent years have seen a large expansion in the use of rigorous impact evaluation techniques. Increasingly, public administrations are collaborating with academic economists and other quantitative social scientists to apply such rigorous methods to the study of public finance. These developments allow for more reliable measurements of the effects of different policy options on the behavioral responses of citizens, firm owners, or public officials. They can help decision makers in tax administrations, public procurement offices, and other public agencies design programs informed by well-founded evidence. This article provides an introductory overview of the most frequently used impact evaluation methods. It is aimed at facilitating communication and collaboration between practitioners and academics by introducing key vocabulary and concepts used in rigorous impact evaluation methods, starting with randomized controlled trials and comparing them with other methods ranging from simple pre–post analysis to difference-in-differences, matching estimations, and regression discontinuity designs.
To improve use tax compliance, twenty-seven states have added a line to their income tax returns where taxpayers can report taxable sales. This article reports results of a behavioral study of a postcard "nudge" sent to income tax filers in one of those states, Nebraska, to encourage self-reporting of liability. The research question is whether the informational nudge was sufficient to alter self-reporting behavior. Data indicate that the nudge more than doubled the likelihood of use tax reporting and nearly doubled the amount of revenue collected, but the rate of use tax reporting remains extremely low. Probit models reveal that use tax reporting rises with income at a decreasing rate. Selection models are also estimated because of positive selection bias in the selection of the treatment group. Taken together, the results indicate that an informational nudge is not likely to be sufficient to substantially change use tax reporting behavior.
This article models interjurisdictional competition over nonlinear taxes on the incomes of mobile individuals. Each individual has exogenous wealth and a location preference that is drawn from a continuous distribution. We find that more concave utility of consumption functions lead to more progressive tax structures, as richer people place less value on marginal consumption relative to location. In the benchmark model, a relative risk aversion coefficient of one is the boundary between progressivity and regressivity. The exercise helps us to understand which types of jurisdictions are more likely to have progressive taxes as their optimal policies.
Tax competition scholars are increasingly recognizing that states compete with each other not only by manipulating tax rates but also by adopting tax incentives. However, there is a comparative lack of empirical literature exploring why states adopt different types of tax incentives. This article draws on the literatures on tax competition and policy diffusion to develop hypotheses about what factors motivate states to adopt business tax incentives, paying particular attention to the influence of other adopting states. It uses event history analysis methods to test hypotheses regarding the adoption of four state tax incentive policies: investment tax credits, apportionment formula changes, research and development tax credits, and job creation tax credits. Regression results show that factors that influence adoption decisions are largely inconsistent across the four incentive types. However, analyses of duration dependence find evidence consistent with the idea that states are "racing to the bottom."
Public sector corruption has been shown to increase death rates and damages from natural disasters. We consider whether natural hazards can lead to rising levels of public sector corruption. This might seem unlikely since natural hazards are predetermined, naturally occurring events. However, when the distinction between hazards and disasters is considered, it becomes clear that corruption may well increase the likelihood that any new hazard will become a disaster, increasing the existing level of corruption within a given country. Based on standard estimation techniques, we find a statistically significant, positive relation between predetermined natural hazards and public sector corruption.
A well-developed and carefully maintained public infrastructure system is of critical importance to ensure that the economy can function effectively. To investigate the consequence of deficient public transportation infrastructure conditions on states’ creditworthiness, this study constructs an infrastructure health index to measure the physical conditions of state highway transportation systems and empirically estimates the effect of the overall health of state highway transportation infrastructure on Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s state credit ratings by using a data set from 1999 to 2009. The empirical results indicate that the poorer the quality of a state’s highway infrastructure, the lower the probability that the state will be in a higher credit rating category, and the higher the probability that the state will be in the medium or low credit rating category. This finding suggests that state policy makers should be cautioned about the negative consequences of cutting spending on infrastructure maintenance and expansion.
The goal of this article is to assess whether state monitoring and reporting of local government fiscal condition causes improvement in the financial situation of local governments. From 2006 to 2011, Michigan scored the fiscal conditions of each of its local governments based on their performance across nine indicators of fiscal health. Using audited financial data, we construct a panel of several of those financial indicators for a sample of county and municipal governments in Michigan and neighboring states with no similar program. We employ a difference-in-differences methodology to test whether Michigan’s local governments performed better across the selected indicators relative to their peers in neighboring states. The results of the analysis show no significant change in the monitored indicators among Michigan’s local governments relative to local governments in control states. We largely duplicate the baseline results using propensity score matching.
The role of extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation in environmental decisions remain unresolved. We exploit data from a lab-in-the-field experiment to analyze the role of extrinsic and intrinsic incentives in shaping individual demand for a payment for environmental services (PES) program in São Paulo, Brazil. The lab-in-the-field experiment is a theoretical incentive program that offers annual payments to landholders in vulnerable watersheds for either conserving and/or restoring trees surrounding springs on their land to preserve and improve local water quality. Our findings suggest that, in contrast with predictions from rational choice theory, individuals’ responses to incentives are not monotonic. Landholders who took part in our lab-in-the-field experiment were randomly assigned to four offer levels and asked a double-bounded contingent valuation question to elicit a willingness to accept value. Landholders were less likely to accept the higher offers compared to the lowest offers. Given that the rational choice model fails to fully account for the role of incentives in shaping demand for PES, we then look at the interaction of the randomized incentive offers and individuals’ initial intrinsic motivations. We find that, while high monetary incentives crowd in demand of progovernment landholders, they crowd out demand of proenvironment and prosocial landholders. Overall, we find much evidence of heterogeneous responses.
Using U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant panel data, Hegde and Mowery and Hegde look at political influence at the US congressional level on the allocation of these funds. Their key finding is that members of the Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee and former New York Senator Al D’Amato as a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee were able to indirectly steer NIH grant money to organizations in their home states. A reexamination of their evidence does not support that conclusion.
In this reply, I commented on Hannum’s (this issue) replication of Hegde and of Hegde and Mowery. I conclude that, in his eagerness to show us wrong, Hannum appears to have committed exactly the wrong that replication exercises are meant to right.
Almost a third of US children ages two to nineteen are deemed overweight or obese, and part of the problem is the habitual decision to consume high-calorie, low-nutrient foods. We propose that the school lunchroom provides a "teachable moment" to engage children in making healthful choices. We conduct a field experiment with over 1,500 participants in grades K to 8 from low-income households in the Chicago Heights, Illinois, School District and then evaluate the impact of small nonmonetary incentives on the selection of milk in the school lunchroom. At baseline, only 16 percent of children select white milk relative to 84 percent choosing chocolate milk. We find a significant effect of incentives, which increase white milk selection by 2.5 times, to 40 percent. One concern with incentives is that they may decrease intrinsic motivation to eat healthy, called "crowd-out of intrinsic motivation." However, we do not find evidence of "crowd-out"; rather, we see some suggestive evidence of the positive habit forming effect of incentives.
The tools of predictive analytics are widely used in the analysis of large data sets to predict future patterns in the system. In particular, predictive analytics is used to estimate risk of engaging in certain behavior. Risk-based audits are used by revenue services to target potentially noncompliant taxpayers, but the results of predictive analytics serve predominantly only as a guide rather than a rule. "Auditor judgment" retains an important role in selecting audit targets. This article assesses the effectiveness of using predictive analytics in a model of the compliance decision that incorporates several components from behavioral economics: subjective beliefs about audit probabilities, a social custom reward from honest tax payment, and a degree of risk aversion that increases with age. Simulation analysis shows that predictive analytics are successful in raising compliance and that the resulting pattern of audits is very close to being a cutoff rule.
This article investigates the effects of block grants on education expenditures using panel data from Canadian provinces over the period 1982 to 2008. Our main empirical identification strategy relies on the use of the allocation formula for equalization grant—a component of the Canadian federal block grant. The results indicate that block grants have stimulative effects on provincial education expenditure. Our results suggest that a one dollar increase in per capita federal grants is associated with an increase in per capita education expenditure of about Can$0.21, which is roughly proportional to the share of education in total provincial spending. The results are robust to various sensitivity checks.
Taxes are a burdensome and tedious issue for self-employed who have just started their business. The present research suggests mental accounting as a measure for self-employed to keep track of their financial activities. Based on prospect theory, we argue that the mental segregation of taxes due from net income affects a taxpayer’s reference point in the compliance decision and results in higher tax compliance. Findings from a laboratory experiment confirm this prediction. Further, we show that relevance of mental tax accounting is higher when the tax due is not specified externally as it is the case in pay slips provided to employees. The individual tendency toward mental segregation of tax due and net income is positively related to the sex and age of respondents, their attitudes toward taxpaying, and their experiences gathered in the course of the experiment.
The use of local options sales taxes (LOSTs) is creating largely unexplored equity concerns with regard to the revenue raising capabilities of different local governments. This article focuses on differences among urban, suburban, and rural counties; the impact of proximity to urban (or retail) centers; and the impact of LOST decisions on tourism rich counties, a new category of local governments. Using data from 2003 to 2009 on all 100 North Carolina counties and a spatial Durbin error panel model, I identify factors relating to LOST revenue raising capacity (RRC). The results indicate that tourism rich counties have the greatest LOST capacity, suburban counties have the least, and there is a penalty for bordering an urban county. However, statistically significant differences in the RRC of the four types of counties disappear once property taxes are included in the mix.
This article considers the question of whether marginal tax rates (MTRs) in the US income tax system are on the "right" side of their respective Laffer curves. Previous attention has tended to focus specifically on the top MTR. Conceptual expressions for these "revenue-maximizing elasticities of taxable income" (ETI L ), based on readily observable tax parameters, are presented for each tax rate in a multi-rate income tax system. Applying these to the US income tax, with its complex effective marginal rate structure, demonstrates that a wide range of revenue-maximizing ETI values can be expected within, and across, tax brackets and for all taxpayers in aggregate. For some significant groups of taxpayers, these revenue-maximizing ETIs appear to be within the range of empirically estimated elasticities.
Using quarterly data over the period 1999 to 2013, we estimate the elasticity of corporate income tax (CIT) revenue to output gap in Greece. The elasticity is estimated to be about 1.40 to 1.55 when we use the profit share in its construction, while it increases to 1.83 to 2.05 when profit is used in its construction. The high values of the new estimated elasticity imply substantial CIT buoyancy effects in the years to come, provided that the current reform program of the Greek economy remains on track.
This article examines the determinants of the shadow economy across American states, with emphasis on cross-border spillover effects. Results show positive spillovers of shadow activities across state borders with different specifications. In other effects, greater unionization in a state induces businesses to go underground, while states without a sales tax had a smaller shadow economy, ceteris paribus. Greater state product checked shadow growth, with military and nonmilitary state products having opposite effects. Finally, states bordering Canada and Mexico had different flows from the shadow sector.
Using a two-period overlapping generations model and three panel data sets of annual aggregate data from twenty-five countries, we estimate a fixed-effects Euler equation for household saving. We focus on the effects of several institutional and other variables, such as corruption and the debt to gross domestic product (GDP) ratio, on household saving and on the probability that a pay-as-you-go social security system will grant pensions. We find that social security contributions reduce saving in a less than one-for-one manner. Also, as corruption or the debt to GDP ratio increases, the probability that the system will grant pensions falls, and so does the effect of social security contributions on saving. Finally, the marginal effect of an improvement in the quality of institutions on the credibility of the social security system is greater in countries where the quality of institutions is low than in countries where it is high, a result that stresses the role of institutions in reducing uncertainty about pensions.
Gore’s article explores the determinants and implications of cash reserves. Here, we replicate Gore’s finding of a positive relationship between environmental uncertainty and municipal fund balances using the same data, the same specifications, and the same econometric software. We also test the robustness of her original findings by adding years and observations. We show that the empirical results reported in Gore’s article are largely replicable and that its results are robust to substantial data extensions. Nevertheless, we believe that Gore reaches normative conclusions that municipalities hold "excess cash reserves," which are not justified by her empirical results.
This article studies the Mexican state-level impact on health outcomes of the decentralization of health funding and responsibilities that took place in 1997. Since the reform took place simultaneously in all states, we focus on a difference in difference estimation of whether those states that received more funds achieved better health outcomes after health services decentralization. According to our results, those states that received more funds did not boost the advances in health outcomes already achieved under the centralized health sector regime. There are two main possible explanations for these results. First, the allocation among states of the earmarked fund that was created as a result of the reform failed to take into account state-specific health needs. Second, the decentralization reform was not enough since it did not concede more tax autonomy to states and no other mechanisms were implemented to maintain states accountable for their health expenditure decisions.
I investigate the relation between corruption and the composition of state government spending in the United States. The analysis reveals that the United States is not immune to the adverse effects of corruption documented in cross-country studies. Corruption lowers the share of state government spending devoted to higher education and raises the share of spending devoted to other and unallocable budget items. These results are robust to the use of political variables to instrument for corruption. There is also some evidence that corruption lowers the share of spending on corrections and public welfare and raises the share of spending on health and hospitals, housing and community development, and natural resources.
Considerable prior analysis has gone into the study of zoning restrictions on locational choice and on fiscal burdens, but none addresses the level and distribution of public goods provided under fiscal zoning. Our analysis emphasizes the interplay between land-use restrictions and public good provision, focusing on schooling outcomes. We extend existing general equilibrium models of location and the provision of education so that fiscal zoning can be put into Tiebout choice. Some households create a fiscal burden, motivating the use of exclusionary land-use controls by local governments. We then analyze the market effects of different land-use controls (minimum lot size [MLS] zoning, local public finance with a head tax, and growth restrictions through fringe zoning) and demonstrate how household behavior directly affects the equilibrium outcomes and the provision of the local public good.
We examine the effect of a state-funded property tax homestead exemptions on the burden of property taxes. This class of exemptions is characterized by a grant from the state to local governments that is intended to replace the reduction in property tax revenue due to the exemption. The median voter model predicts that part of the homestead exemption will be used to increase expenditures. In addition, fiscal illusion could reduce the effectiveness of this type of grant in lowering the tax burden. We test these predictions for the Georgia’s Homeowner’s Tax Relief Grant program by separately using panels of county-level data and school system data. We find that over one-third of funds transferred to counties through this program are used to increase revenues rather than provide tax relief. We find evidence of possible fiscal illusion for school systems.
This article breaks from the previous empirical literature that estimates Nash tax reaction functions of national governments competing with other national governments assuming that competitors play a Nash game and adjust to a Nash equilibrium in every year. We question this assumption and explore whether one country plays a leadership role in tax competition using data from 1968 to 2008. We test the leadership role of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany, and find support for a US leadership role. We also investigate whether countries react differently immediately after watershed tax reforms such as the 1986 US Tax Reform Act or the 1984 UK tax reform. We find some support for a different reaction to the United States following the 1986 US reform, but not for the United Kingdom or Germany.
Many studies have investigated the determinants of current local public expenditures whereas only a few have studied the factors explaining the capital decision-making process at the local government level. This study uses a panel data set of Connecticut town and cities over the 2000 to 2010 period to estimate the local public demand for various types of capital infrastructure projects. The multiple regression analysis reveals a number of insights regarding the capital-investment decision of local communities. First, unlike the demand for current expenditures, the demand for capital-investment projects is elastic with respect to tax price. Second, unlike the demand for current expenditures, the demand for capital projects is not directly related to changes in income. Finally, intergovernmental grants are shown to be an important determinant of capital investment spending although the specific aid doesn’t always seem to stick where it initially hits.
This article explores the impact of school district consolidation on house values based on house sales in upstate New York State from 2000 to 2012. By combining propensity score matching (PSM) and double-sales data to compare house value changes in consolidating and comparable school districts, we find that, except in one relatively large district, consolidation has a negative impact on house values during the years right after it occurs and that this effect then fades away and is eventually reversed. This pattern suggests that it takes time either for the advantages of consolidation to be apparent or for the people who prefer consolidated districts to move in. Finally, as in previous studies, the long-run impacts of consolidation on house values are positive in census tracts that initially have low incomes, but negative in high-income census tracts, where parents may have a relatively large willingness to retain the nonbudgetary advantages of small districts.
This article uses a new hedonic technique to examine households’ ethnic preferences and help assessors estimate the impact of neighborhood ethnicity on housing prices. A hedonic function, which relates housing and neighborhood characteristics to house values, is the envelope of households’ bids for these characteristics. This article derives this envelope by combining theories about household sorting across neighborhoods with constant-elasticity demand functions for neighborhood characteristics and housing. Estimates for the Cleveland area in 2000 find that some households prefer neighborhoods without black or Hispanic residents, whereas others prefer largely black or Hispanic neighborhoods, and that house values reflect ethnic preferences.
This article examines the relationship between federal transfers and fiscal deficits in India. The current system of transfers has been criticized on the grounds that it distorts the incentives for states to promote fiscal discipline. We analyze the relationship between transfers, state domestic product, and fiscal deficit for a panel of states during the period 1990 to 2010. The article finds a positive long-run relationship and bidirectional causality between primary/gross fiscal deficits and non-plan transfers. Further, there is a negative long-run relationship and one-way causality from state domestic product to transfers. These results are confirmed by multivariate cointegration analysis, which finds a long-run relationship between fiscal transfers, state product per capita, and state primary deficit. The evidence in the article is consistent with the system of fiscal transfers being "gap filling."
This study explores the impact of balanced-budget rules on states’ fiscal policy outcomes and tests whether this impact depends on the political and economic environments in light of the American states’ experience from 2004 to 2010. The findings suggest that (1) budget rules are more binding in recessions as compared with "normal" times; (2) the impact of the rule depends on the political environment, especially on the party identity of the governor; (3) a divided government influences the rule’s impact, particularly when one party controls the governorship and another controls the legislature; and (4) states’ responses, as measured by total budget cuts, to unexpected revenue shocks (such as unexpected decreases in tax revenue) tend to be larger than states’ responses to unexpected expenditure shocks.
The article applies microsimulation modeling techniques exploiting five waves of Household Expenditure Survey (HES) data in order to study how the distributional impact of indirect taxes in Greece has changed over the last twenty-five years (1988–2011). It turns out that the radical simplification of the tax system, primarily induced by European Union (EU) membership, was achieved at a small cost in terms of equity. The recent successive fiscal consolidation packages, adopted in response to the fiscal crisis, involved major indirect tax hikes that significantly increased the indirect tax burden for Greek households. The 2011 indirect tax system appears as the most regressive along the period studied, both in terms of its effect on inequality and in terms of unfavorably targeting distributionally sensitive commodities. The impact of the reforms was particularly adverse for vulnerable population groups like families with children (especially the poorest ones) and the unemployed. For austerity not to further challenge social cohesion, policy measures have to be planned in a more informed manner.
This study replicates the empirical findings of Toya and Skidmore (2007), henceforth TS, and performs a variety of robustness checks. Using an extensive data set of international disasters, TS report that a number of economic development variables are significantly related to mitigation of adverse disaster consequences. We are able to exactly replicate their findings. Our robustness checks consist of two parts. First, we update TS’s original data set, with respect to both variable values and years of coverage. We then address a number of estimation and specification issues. With one exception, our robustness checks fail to find strong evidence that economic development variables (income, educational attainment, size of government, economic openness, and financial sector development) are statistically related to either fatalities or economic damages. The exception is that we find that higher national income is associated with reduced economic losses (as a share of gross domestic product) from natural disasters.
Population aging has led to demands for subsidization of home care for the elderly, and many countries now provide such help. In this article, we investigate analytically and with simulation the fiscal incidence of a cost-sharing price subsidy for home care. Our focus is on incidence and benefit shifting between elderly parents and their children who provide time or money. We first derive incidence indexes on a budgetary and on a welfare basis. We then simulate our indexes using Canadian data in order to understand how incidence actually depends on basic family structure, the nature of altruism, and other key factors. Finally, we simulate the implications for fiscal incidence of a switch from a price subsidy to a lump-sum allowance that allows the family somewhat greater freedom of choice. The article concludes with reflections on the general state of expenditure incidence analysis.
American states and localities levy several taxes on business capital. Vertical tax competition arises as a state and its local governments tax a common base, while horizontal competition takes place across states, local governments in different states, and between local governments in one state and other states. Our application is unique in focusing on multiple federations and allowance for both intrafederation and interfederation competition. We find negative vertical reaction functions for states and localities indicating that capital tax rates are strategic substitutes. Local tax rates, on the other hand, react positively to other-state tax rates and to the rates of localities elsewhere. State rates are not affected by the rates of localities in other states, but they do react positively to the rates of neighboring states. We find evidence that states behave as Stackelberg leaders in the setting of capital taxes.
The goal of the Medicaid intergovernmental matching grant is to stimulate state spending while achieving some level of beneficiary and taxpayer equity. This study uses the Current Population Survey data on 174,031 families to estimate federal and state Medicaid tax burdens per family, net of tax exporting. Of the total US$305 billion spent on Medicaid in 2004, US$29.9 billion is redistributed through the grant’s Federal Medical Assistance Percentage, as residents of low-income states export federal tax burdens to higher-income states. Another US$4.5 billion in state taxes is exported via business flows and tourism with the bulk, US$3.2 billion, being exported internationally. Some states pay as little as US$.55 in "own" tax revenues while residents in states importing the burden pay up to US$1.86, for every US$1 spent on Medicaid. Since virtually all states have regressive tax structures, it is federal Medicaid funding that helps maintain vertical equity overall.
Using data from the contiguous US states from 1951 to 2008, this study examines the dynamics of the intertemporal budget constraint to better understand persistent budget deficits. The direction of causality between tax revenues and expenditures is of primary interest in answering the four hypotheses set forth in the literature: tax-spend, spend-tax, fiscal synchronization, and institutional separation. Overall, the results convey evidence in favor of the tax-spend hypothesis. The dynamics differ, however, in that states with relatively higher debt levels respond slower to fiscal imbalances and rely more on expanding debt levels. These results present a clear illustration of the fiscal adjustment mechanism and how states adapt under various institutional restraints.
In light of recent policy discussions aimed at reforming Medicaid, it is important to understand how the elderly respond to changes in the incentives of Medicaid. This article estimates the effect of a decrease in the implicit tax of holding assets brought about by the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act of 1988. Using the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), I find that a $1 increase in state asset protections increased median total wealth holdings by $0.20, financial wealth by $0.04, and home equity by $0.27. As expected, larger responses are found for residents of states with income limits in place prior to the law change and for states that chose the highest level of protected resource amounts.
This study analyzes the influence of fragmentation and concentration variables on per capita direct expenditures for all counties in the United States from 1982 to 2002. Building on recent research, fragmentation and concentration variables are developed to incorporate the horizontal as well as the vertical dimensions. This analysis explicitly takes into account the potential simultaneity between individual preferences for the spatial arrangement of local governments and the size of the local public sector using the element of time. The findings suggest that increased levels of fragmentation lead to an enlargement of the local public sector; however, the results are more complex than expected. Similarly, the concentration of service delivery responsibilities into counties and single purpose districts tends to increase the size of the local public sector.
In this reply we offer a response to the Mercer and Reed (forthcoming) replication of Toya and Skidmore (2007). The replication study extends the original work in several important dimensions and is a very useful contribution. Nevertheless, we offer additional evaluation and discussion of the robustness portion of their replication. In particular, we consider the fixed effects and interval regression estimates.
In 1983, federal and state governments began taxing the social security benefits of high-income elderly. We develop a conceptual model and use 1981–1986 Current Population Survey data to estimate the policy’s labor supply effects. Our estimates suggest that the approximate 20 percent reduction in benefits for the highest income individuals led to a two to five percentage point increase in their labor force participation. Using 2008 data, we show that failing to index the taxation thresholds for inflation, adding a second set of thresholds in 1993, and removing the earnings test in 2000 all substantially magnify the policy’s scope.
This article investigates how the distribution of income changes when the standard disposable income (DI) is replaced by an extended income (EI) concept that includes the three "I"s: indirect taxes, imputed rent, and in-kind benefits. Second, it assesses the distributional effects of the main types of tax-benefit instruments under different income concepts. The analysis covers three European countries (Belgium, Greece, and the United Kingdom) characterized by substantially different tax-benefit systems. The overall redistributive effect of the tax-benefit systems depends heavily on the income concept considered and the differences across countries are smaller when considering the EI. Moreover, the common use of a narrower income concept, such as the DI, can lead to the overestimation of the redistributive effect of the cash tax-benefit instruments (in relative terms), the extent of this varying across countries, due to the size and distribution of three "I"s and the adoption of the needs-adjusted equivalence scale.
Housing market distortions from the mortgage interest deduction (MID) typically focus on a single choice measure such as home size or self-reported amount of debt on a new mortgage. We estimate the amount of mortgage interest deducted on federal tax returns to capture the full range of housing market distortions from the MID. Our primary results show that for every one percentage point increase in the tax rate that applies to deductibility, the amount of mortgage interest deducted increases by US$303 to US$590. Empirical estimates imply elasticities of mortgage interest deducted with respect to the after-tax cost of housing between -0.78 and -1.62, and deadweight loss estimates ranging from 16 to 36 percent of MID tax expenditure.
This study investigates the relationship between the state sales and use tax (SUT) burden and manufacturing firms’ employment and capital expenditures for the period 1983–2006. Using an instrumental variable model, our results indicate that the SUT burden (i.e., the product between the sales and use tax rate and sales and use tax exemptions) on purchases of materials and machinery is related to changes in capital expenditures and employment, even after controlling for corporate income tax variables and other economic factors. The economic impact of this relationship is relatively small; however, the results have important policy implications in the present lean state budget environment, as state legislators must balance revenue needs with the desire to provide economic development incentives.
In response to the recent fiscal crisis, state governments in the United States have deeply cut aid, often by the same percentage across communities. This across-the-board approach ignores local fiscal disparities and places a larger burden on communities in worse underlying fiscal health. This article introduces a more equitable approach to distributing aid cuts based on both underlying local fiscal health and the existing aid distribution. Policy simulations using Massachusetts data show that this approach could be politically feasible, as a majority of communities and state population would receive smaller aid cuts under this gap-based approach than under across-the-board cuts.
This study assesses how fiscal policy affects the dynamics of asset markets, using Bayesian vector autoregressive models. We use sign restrictions to identify government revenue and government spending shocks, while controlling for generic business cycle and monetary policy shocks. Using South African quarterly data from 1966: Q1 to 2011: Q2, we find that fiscal spending shocks affect stock prices more than house prices. Both spending and revenue shocks affect stock prices whereas only revenue shocks affect house prices.
This study examines the relationship between the ratio of government expenditure to gross domestic product and economic activity by investigating the empirical validity of Wagner’s law in selected Caribbean countries. Additionally, the study tests the ratchet hypothesis by searching for evidence of asymmetry in public spending over the business cycle. It narrows a gap in the Caribbean literature by (1) explicitly considering population structure in the empirical investigation of Wagner’s Law and (2) utilizing advanced econometrics techniques that incorporate nonlinearity in testing causality. The study finds no empirical support for Wagner’s Law, with and without population structure taken into account. However, the ratchet hypothesis is validated. The findings provide useful information for policy makers that can help broaden their understanding of the relationship between government spending and national income, which could aid policy formulation.
This article investigates the relation between state tax amnesties and financial reporting irregularities. State tax amnesty programs, which potentially signal a lax regulatory enforcement environment, provide a unique setting in which to examine the effects of state tax authorities on non-tax financial reporting behavior. The results suggest that firms headquartered in states offering a tax amnesty program are more likely to begin engaging in a financial reporting irregularity during the amnesty period. Furthermore, the results show that the observed increase in financial reporting irregularities occurs only during periods of repeat, not initial, amnesty programs. These findings suggest state tax amnesties have previously unexplored adverse effects on managers’ behavior.
We study the differential effects of tax reforms on actual and observed net income inequality in a laboratory experiment where participants first supply effort and then make a tax reporting decision. We show that for a group with relatively homogeneous levels of true gross income, higher taxes increase both actual and observed inequality but have a larger effect on actual inequality. We decompose the effect of tax rates into a mechanical tax effect and two behavioral (effort and evasion) effects. Our results indicate that the mechanical and effort effects on actual inequality are larger than on observed inequality while the evasion effect is generally larger on observed inequality. We also find that the size of the effects, relative to each other, depends on the measure of income.
Saez finds that the budget constraint nonlinearities caused by the earned income tax credit (EITC) lead to bunching behavior for the self-employed but not for salaried workers. Possible explanations for these findings are both differences in flexibility of hours worked and differences in tax noncompliance opportunities among these two groups. This article provides evidence on the mechanism underlying this differential bunching behavior. By comparing estimates of labor supply effects of the EITC from two different data sets, where individuals have different incentives to misreport income, my article suggests that the bunching behavior found in Saez is mainly driven by tax noncompliance. Moreover, I find that real labor supply responses of the self-employed are similar to those of salaried workers.
Market value–based assessment systems introduce objectivity and transparency into the assessment process by partially removing assessors’ bias while benchmarking assessed values against the recently sold properties. This article explores vertical equity of Indiana’s new market value–based assessment system over a decade of 2000s including the years of the housing crisis (2008–2010). Five methods are used to assess vertical equity of the system, including locally weighted and quantile regressions. The results demonstrate a significant increase in vertical inequity during the years of the housing crisis. Assessment regressivity is particularly acute at the tails of the ratio distribution: the least expensive properties are overassessed, while the most expensive ones are underassessed. While a self-regulating assessment system is yet to be discovered, I recommend reducing the time intervals between mass reassessments and introducing independent audits for properties that are most susceptible to overassessment and underassessment to remedy vertical inequity of the property tax.
This article analyzes the fiscal incidence of cash and in-kind transfers, taxes, and subsidies in Bolivia. Between 2007 and 2009, social spending as a share of gross domestic product rose by about three percentage points. In spite of this, fiscal policy in Bolivia has shown a low redistributive impact. The weak impact is mainly due to the presence of significant leakages in transfers to the nonpoor and to the small size of per beneficiary transfers. The impact of fiscal policy on poverty and income inequality could increase with better targeting to the poor, larger per capita benefits, and an increase in coverage and progressivity of the tax system.
Standard tax and benefit incidence analysis is used to estimate the effects of fiscal policy on poverty and inequality in Peru. Results suggest that the extent of inequality and poverty reduction induced by Peru’s fiscal policy is small. This result is associated with low social spending rather than with inefficient spending. Most social spending components are progressive and overall social spending is also progressive. We find that direct cash transfers are well targeted and are especially effective in reducing extreme poverty in rural areas. We also find that in-kind transfers are effective in reducing inequality. Finally, direct taxes slightly reduce inequality, while, countering intuition, indirect taxes are neutral once informality is incorporated in the estimates.
Billions of dollars have been transferred to state governments for disaster recovery. Owing to the discretionary authority of the president in these decisions, moral hazard may influence approval of such requests. We test within a model of recursive choice the hypothesis that the sequential executive decisions to grant disaster declarations and the conditional amount of aid allocated are affected by political incentives. We combine expenditure and approval data from FEMA with state-level census and political data for the period 1969 through 2005. After accounting for the severity of flood damage in the state and the ability of the state to recover, an incumbent president is more likely to grant disaster declarations when facing reelection, particularly in states with a larger number of electoral votes and in states with a governor from the same political party as the president. We also find Democratic presidents award more disaster aid than their Republican counterparts.
In oligopoly, comparison of the tax pass-through favors the use of ad valorem taxes compared to unit taxes. We argue that, in addition to differences in tax pass-through, the two taxes have a dissimilar effect on firms’ strategic interaction. The anticompetitive effects of the two taxes favor unit taxes over ad valorem taxes. We show both when there is a preference for unit taxation and when it is likely that the conventional preference for ad valorem taxation is upheld.
How much redistribution does Uruguay accomplish through social spending and taxes? How progressive are revenue collection and social spending? What could be done to further increase redistribution and improve redistributional effectiveness? A standard fiscal incidence analysis shows that Uruguay achieves a nontrivial reduction in inequality and poverty when all taxes and transfers are combined. Direct taxes are progressive and indirect taxes are practically neutral. Social spending on direct transfers, contributory pensions, education, and health is quite progressive in absolute terms except for tertiary education, which is almost neutral in relative terms. Specific suggestions for improving the effectiveness are suggested.
Political budget cycle models have been widely tested, but few studies consider different institutional contexts and different categories of public spending. This article uses data on disaggregated expenditures to estimate the effects of balanced budget requirements on electoral cycles. Using data of American states from 1977 to 2008, the analysis finds that prior to gubernatorial elections, politicians are likely to shift public spending toward more salient categories, such as corrections, security, and welfare expenditure, and away from education expenditure. This finding is consistent with the prediction of Rogoff’s signaling model. Yet, such effects are only significant in states with weak and medium carryover restrictions and are dampened as carryover restrictions become more stringent. Thus, balanced budget requirements constrain politicians’ ability to shift spending across different categories. Without considering the balanced budget requirements, the effects of political budget cycles may be overstated.
This article examines the fiscal outlook and tax reform options in the United States. The major conclusions include the following: the United States faces a substantial fiscal shortfall in the medium- and long term; both spending cuts and tax increases should contribute to the solution; tax increases need not do significant harm to economic growth; and there are sensible ways to both reform tax structure and raise revenues, including the redesign of tax expenditures, the creation of a value-added tax or a carbon tax, or an increase in the gasoline tax.
The literature on the tragedy of the commons is voluminous, and application to the fiscal commons is well established. In this article, we extend this application by examining the effects of the distribution of state and local governments’ tax liability on budgetary outcomes. Different tax structures yield vastly different contributions from members of the polity, but all members may influence the draw from the fiscal commons through the political process. We find that when the tax burden is heavier for taxpayers at the top of the income distribution and lighter for taxpayers at the bottom of the income distribution, state and local government expenditures grow, and governments spend more on social welfare. However, we do not find a link between the distribution of tax liability and debt.
This study explores the performance of assessment administration during the Great Recession using a panel of Washington state counties from 2006 to 2011. The housing bust is treated as a productivity shock to the assessment process. Due to rapidly changing environmental conditions and declining assessor resources, assessment performance, as measured by the residential coefficient of dispersion, is predicted to suffer. Only the former condition is found to impact residential assessment uniformity, however. The results suggest that the increased task complexity in an environment of falling home prices gives homeowners experiencing wide swings in market value de facto assessment relief. In order to maintain high levels of performance during poor economic conditions, a number of policy alternatives are proposed.
Recent studies examining the relationship between legislative majorities and state budgets have presented mixed results. We provide new insight on this relationship by employing stochastic frontier analysis to model the maximum potential budgets that could be feasibly produced, given a set of economic, political, and voter inputs. This allows us to examine directly how the size of ruling party majorities influences their ability to efficiently produce the maximum feasible budget. At the same time, we are able to analyze the inefficiency in budget maximization. We find that as parties consolidate power with large majorities—regardless of party identity—they are less able to maximize budgets leading to state budgets below the maximum possible size of government as estimated by our model. Our results suggest that parties that do not maximize spending are inefficient at spending but efficient at providing the services that voters want at a low price. Hence, those parties build larger coalitions.
We analyze the compliance costs of individual taxpayers resulting from the German income tax (tax year 2007). Using survey data that have been raised between December 2008 and April 2009, we find evidence for a considerably higher cost burden of self-employed taxpayers. Taxable income and a higher education (university degree) are positively correlated with compliance costs, while the time effort of female taxpayers is significantly lower. By contrast, joint filing of married couples reduces the burden of tax compliance. The aggregate cost estimate of German income taxpayers amounts to 6 to 9 billion, respectively, 3.1 to 4.7 percent of the income tax revenue in 2007. This estimate is higher than latest projections in a number of other European countries like Spain and Sweden, but lower than estimates for the United States and Australia.
Capitalization of the property tax is of particular interest in Norway since many local governments decide not to have a property tax. We apply a rich data set of housing transactions and characteristics for three years (1997–1999) and combine them with local government-level data about property taxation, local services, and community characteristics. The analysis of capitalization faces serious methodological challenges of endogeneity and background factors affecting housing prices and local fiscal decisions. We investigate the relationship between property tax and housing prices using a variety of econometric specifications and using instruments for property taxation. The results indicate that housing prices respond to property taxation and with full capitalization at realistic discount rates. High child care coverage also contributes to high housing prices. The existence of capitalization effects suggests that housing markets reflect local fiscal conditions and that residential mobility is of importance to understand local government resource use.
This article concerns income taxation and commodity taxation in a multijurisdiction framework with transboundary environmental damage. The decision problem facing the government in each such jurisdiction is represented by a two-type model (with asymmetric information between the government and the private sector). We show how the possibility to influence the world market producer price adds mechanisms of relevance for redistribution and externality correction which, in turn, affect the domestic use of taxation. Finally, with the noncooperative Nash equilibrium as a reference case, we consider the welfare effects of policy coordination.
This article explores the capacity for environmental fiscal reform to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, stimulate economic performance, and promote fiscal sustainability. Simulation results suggest that reforms based on CO2 taxation stimulate gross domestic product (GDP) when tax revenues are used to promote private or public investment and stimulate employment when used to finance reductions in personal income taxation or firms’ social security contributions. More generally, reforms allow for reductions in the costs of climate policy, a weaker realization of the second dividend. In addition, several reforms lead to reductions in public debt, the realization of a third dividend. When political constraints on reducing public spending are considered, however, this third dividend only materializes when revenues finance public investment or reductions in the firms’ social security contributions. Overall, our results suggest that low growth and high public debt need not be regarded as hindrances for environmental fiscal reform but can actually be seen as catalysts.
This study examines the effects of military base closures on educational expenditures and student outcomes with a national panel data set of school districts between 1990 and 2002. We adopt difference-in-differences estimation in combination with propensity score matching and instrumental variables techniques to estimate these effects. We find that per-pupil spending increases by 25.2 percent in the first year, where it remains. We also find a substantial decrease in graduation rates, but an improving trend occurs in the years after the closure.
This article investigates whether reputation-building strategies may guide US governors’ state cigarette tax choices and whether the federal cigarette tax influences such behavior. Using 1975–2000 data, we find evidence indicating that governors are prone to engage in reputation building, in particular in states with relatively important agricultural tobacco production. Moreover, lame ducks are more prone to raise the state cigarette tax the lower the federal tax.
This article evaluates the effect of tax and expenditure limitations (TELs) on municipal general own-source revenue in the United States. Using an instrumental variable approach, this study addresses the endogeneity problem of TELs that has been largely overlooked in previous research. Data are collected on 724 US cities with populations of at least 25,000 from 1970 to 2006. Results indicate that when the endogeneity of TELs is taken into account, TELs lead to considerable reductions in property taxes but substantial increases in sales taxes, income taxes, and user charges per capita. The increases in the latter forms of revenue not only offset the loss in property taxes but also generate a supplemental revenue effect, resulting in a net gain of total municipal general own-source revenue per capita. The study provides important policy implications and suggests that TELs may have unintended consequences and lead to bigger government.
A large literature examines the interaction of private and public funding of charities, much of it testing if public funding crowds out private funding. In this article, the author looks for two alternative phenomena using a large panel data set gathered from nonprofit organizations’ tax returns. First, the author looks for crowding out in the opposite direction: increased private funding may cause reduced public funding. Second, the author tests whether one type of funding acts as a signal of charity quality and thus crowds in other funding. The author finds evidence that government grants crowd in private donations. Crowding in is larger for younger charities. This is consistent with signaling, if donors know less about younger charities and the signal value is stronger. The author finds no evidence of an effect of private donations on government grants.
This article examines the influence of federal grants on nonprofit expenditure decisions. The topic is of particular concern for governments who wish to stimulate private provision of public services. Recent research shows that grants may inadvertently reduce private sector provision by causing a reduction in fund-raising effort. This study extends line of inquiry by examining the influence of conditional versus lump-sum-style grants. The article draws detailed grant data from the Federal Assistance Award Data System (FAADS), which includes structural characteristics of the grant. FAADS grant information is combined with a panel of nonprofit financial data. Empirical results demonstrate that, though relatively uncommon in the data, conditional grants are particularly effective at stimulating both additional fund-raising activity and output of the firm. Block-Formula grants appear to significantly reduce both fund-raising and output decisions. The study implies that the use of conditional grants could mitigate crowd-out due to nonprofit management decisions.