Handbook of Public Economics

Handbook of Public Economics
Author: Martin Feldstein
Publisher: Elsevier
Total Pages: 744
Release: 2002-01-25
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0080544193

The Field of Public Economics has been changing rapidly in recent years, and the sixteen chapters contained in this Handbook survey many of the new developments. As a field, Public Economics is defined by its objectives rather than its techniques and much of what is new is the application of modern methods of economic theory and econometrics to problems that have been addressed by economists for over two hundred years. More generally, the discussion of public finance issues also involves elements of political science, finance and philosophy. These connections are evidence in several of the chapters that follow. Public Economics is the positive and normative study of government's effect on the economy. We attempt to explain why government behaves as it does, how its behavior influences the behavior of private firms and households, and what the welfare effects of such changes in behavior are. Following Musgrave (1959) one may imagine three purposes for government intervention in the economy: allocation, when market failure causes the private outcome to be Pareto inefficient, distribution, when the private market outcome leaves some individuals with unacceptably low shares in the fruits of the economy, and stabilization, when the private market outcome leaves some of the economy's resources underutilized. The recent trend in economic research has tended to emphasize the character of stabilization problems as problems of allocation in the labor market. The effects that government intervention can have on the allocation and distribution of an economy's resources are described in terms of efficiency and incidence effects. These are the primary measures used to evaluate the welfare effects of government policy.

NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2005

NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2005
Author: Kenneth S. Rogoff
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 479
Release: 2006-04
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0262072726

The 20th NBER Macroeconomics Annual, covering questions at the cutting edge of macroeconomics that are central to current policy debates.

The New Dynamic Public Finance

The New Dynamic Public Finance
Author: Narayana R. Kocherlakota
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2010-07-01
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1400835275

Optimal tax design attempts to resolve a well-known trade-off: namely, that high taxes are bad insofar as they discourage people from working, but good to the degree that, by redistributing wealth, they help insure people against productivity shocks. Until recently, however, economic research on this question either ignored people's uncertainty about their future productivities or imposed strong and unrealistic functional form restrictions on taxes. In response to these problems, the new dynamic public finance was developed to study the design of optimal taxes given only minimal restrictions on the set of possible tax instruments, and on the nature of shocks affecting people in the economy. In this book, Narayana Kocherlakota surveys and discusses this exciting new approach to public finance. An important book for advanced PhD courses in public finance and macroeconomics, The New Dynamic Public Finance provides a formal connection between the problem of dynamic optimal taxation and dynamic principal-agent contracting theory. This connection means that the properties of solutions to principal-agent problems can be used to determine the properties of optimal tax systems. The book shows that such optimal tax systems necessarily involve asset income taxes, which may depend in sophisticated ways on current and past labor incomes. It also addresses the implications of this new approach for qualitative properties of optimal monetary policy, optimal government debt policy, and optimal bequest taxes. In addition, the book describes computational methods for approximate calculation of optimal taxes, and discusses possible paths for future research.

Capital Mobility and Tax Competition

Capital Mobility and Tax Competition
Author: Clemens Fuest
Publisher: Now Publishers Inc
Total Pages: 72
Release: 2005
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1933019190

Tax competition and coordination is one of the most pressing issues for tax authorities in modern economies, but it is a highly controversial subject. Some argue that tax competition is beneficial by forcing governments to impose efficient tax prices on residents for the provision of public services. Further, some argue that tax competition is also beneficial by limiting the power of governments to levy taxes. Others take a different view - in a world without coordinated tax policies, governments choose sub-optimal levels of public services financed by inefficient taxes that are either too high or too low by ignoring spillovers imposed on other jurisdictions. Capital Mobility and Tax Competition draws out the most important issues of uncoordinated tax policy at the international level for cross-border transactions. The discussion focuses on mobile tax bases, specifically in relation to investment and financial transactions. The main issue for consideration in this survey is whether taxation of income, specifically capital income will survive, how border crossing investment is taxed relative to domestic investment, and whether welfare gains can be achieved through international tax coordination. This survey derives some of the key results on the taxation of international investment in variants of one model of multinational investment. Finally, the authors emphasize the problem of tax competition and financial arbitrage, an issue which is somewhat neglected in the existing survey literature.

Tax By Design

Tax By Design
Author: Stuart Adam
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 552
Release: 2011-09
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0199553742

Based on the findings of a commission chaired by James Mirrlees, this volume presents a coherent picture of tax reform whose aim is to identify the characteristics of a good tax system for any open developed economy, assess the extent to which the UK tax system conforms to these ideals, and recommend how it might be reformed in that direction.

International Aspects of Fiscal Policies

International Aspects of Fiscal Policies
Author: Jacob A. Frenkel
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 422
Release: 2007-12-01
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0226262545

This volume brings together nine papers from a conference on international macroeconomics sponsored by the NBER in 1985. International economists as well as graduate students in the fields of global monetary economics, finance, and macroeconomics will find this an outstanding contribution to current research. It includes two commentaries for each paper, written by experts in the field, and Frenkel's detailed introduction, which serves as a reader's guide to the arguments made, the models employed, and the issues raised by each contributor. The studies analyze national fiscal policies within the context of the international economic order. Malcolm D. Knight and Paul R. Masson use an empirical model to show that fiscal changes in recent years in the United States, West Germany, and Japan have caused major disturbances in net savings and investment flows. Linda S. Kole uses a two-country simulation model to examine the effects of a large nation's expansion on exchange rates, interest rates, and the balance of payments. In other studies, Warwick J. McKibbin and Jeffrey D. Sachs discuss the influences of different currency regimes on the international transmission of inflation; Kent P. Kimbrough analyzes the interaction between optimal tax policies and international trade; Sweder van Wijnbergen investigates the interrelation of fiscal policies, trade intervention, and world interest rates; and Willem H. Buiter uses an analytical model to look at fiscal interdependence and optimal policy design. David Backus, Michael Devereux, and Douglas Purvis develop a theoretical model to investigate effects of different fiscal policies in an open economy. Alan C. Stockman looks at the influence of policy anticipation in the private sector, while Lawrence H. Summers shows the effects of differential tax policy on international competitiveness.

The Economics of Taxation

The Economics of Taxation
Author: Bernard Salanié
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2003
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780262194860

A graduate-level introduction to the economic theories of taxation.

The Economics of New Goods

The Economics of New Goods
Author: Timothy F. Bresnahan
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 508
Release: 2008-04-15
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0226074188

New goods are at the heart of economic progress. The eleven essays in this volume include historical treatments of new goods and their diffusion; practical exercises in measurement addressed to recent and ongoing innovations; and real-world methods of devising quantitative adjustments for quality change. The lead article in Part I contains a striking analysis of the history of light over two millenia. Other essays in Part I develop new price indexes for automobiles back to 1906; trace the role of the air conditioner in the development of the American south; and treat the germ theory of disease as an economic innovation. In Part II essays measure the economic impact of more recent innovations, including anti-ulcer drugs, new breakfast cereals, and computers. Part III explores methods and defects in the treatment of quality change in the official price data of the United States, Canada, and Japan. This pathbreaking volume will interest anyone who studies economic growth, productivity, and the American standard of living.

On the Optimal Taxation of Capital Income

On the Optimal Taxation of Capital Income
Author: Larry E. Jones
Publisher:
Total Pages: 56
Release: 1993
Genre: Capital gains tax
ISBN:

One of the best known results in modern public finance is the Chamley-Judd result showing that the optimal tax rate on capital income is zero in the long-run. In this paper, we reexamine this result by analyzing a series of generalizations of the Chamley-Judd formulation. We show that in a model with human capital, if the tax code is sufficiently rich and there are no pure profits from accumulating human capital, then all distorting taxes are zero in the long-run under the optimal plan. In this sense, income from physical capital is not special. To gain a better understanding of these two conditions, we study examples in which they are not satisfied and show that the optimal tax rate on income from physical capital does not go to zero. In those cases where the limiting tax rate is non-zero, we calculate its value for alternative specifications of the marginal welfare cost of taxation. Our results indicate that even for conservative specifications, tax rates of 10% and higher are possible under the optimal code.