Suchergebnisse

This paper studies the properties of second-best optimal policy in a standard general equilibrium model of growth augmented with renewable natural resources. The government chooses its policy instruments (the income tax rate and the allocation of collected tax revenues between public investment and environmental policy) to solve a Ramsey-type policy problem. The main result is that, the more the citizens care about the environment, the more growth-enhancing policies the government finds it optimal to choose in the long run. This is because when citizens care about the environment, this requires tax revenues for environmental policy and can be only achieved by large tax bases and high growth. Thus, only growing economies can afford to care about the environment. This is the case even if pollution occurs as a by-product of output produced.

In this paper we study the link between elections, fiscal policy and economic growth/fluctuations. The set-up is a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model of growth and endogenously chosen fiscal policy, in which two political parties can alternate in power. The party in office chooses jointly how much to tax and how to allocate its total expenditure between public consumption and production services. The main theoretical prediction is that forward-looking incumbents, with uncertain prospects of re-election, find it optimal to follow relatively shortsighted fiscal policies, and that this lowers economic growth. The model is estimated using quarterly data for Germany, the UK and the US from 1960 to 1999. Our econometric results provide clear support for the main theoretical prediction. They also give plausible and significant estimates for the productivity of public production services, the weight which households place on public consumption services relative to private consumption and the time discount rate. Moreover, we find that changes in electoral uncertainty produce the longest lasting fluctuations in the European economies followed by the US.

AbstractThis paper compares some of the most common ways of financing the provision of publicly provided impure public goods/services in a unified dynamic general equilibrium framework with heterogeneous income groups. The focus is on the effects of user prices on individual incentives and how the latter shape aggregate outcomes and distribution. We show that a market‐like mechanism of user prices not only improves individual incentives and enhances aggregate efficiency, but it is also Pareto improving. However, such a mechanism is not beneficial or simply collapses when social externalities are strong, when the government adopts a mixed system that combines user prices with heavy subsidization of user costs, and when there is a minimum amount of the good that everybody needs.

This paper analyzes long run outcomes resulting from adopting a binding minimum wage. The model distinguishes between workers of heterogeneous ability, and capitalists who do all the saving, and it entails – relative to the perfectly competitive benchmark - large output and employment losses (among the lowest-ability workers) from the imposition of moderately binding minimum wages. These effects arise not only because firms respond to the wage increase – relative to the static perfectly competitive benchmark – by moving upwards along a given labour demand curve, but also due to inward shifts of the labour demand curve as savers respond to decreases in the (net of taxes) rate of return on their savings by saving less, thus reducing the economy's steady-state capital stock. Nevertheless, and despite the large, long-run, declines in aggregate output, consumption, and the capital stock implied by this model, MW legislation can be beneficial for large segments of employed workers, as long as they do not have to provide generous welfare support to the low-ability workers that the MW prevents them from finding employment.

This paper studies the aggregate and distributional implications of introducing consumption taxes into an otherwise deterministic version of the standard neoclassical growth model with income taxes only and heterogeneity across agents. In particular, the economic agents differ among each other with respect to whether they are allowed to save (in physical capital) or not. Policy is optimally chosen by a benevolent Ramsey government. The main theoretical finding comes to confirm the widespread belief that the introduction of consumption taxes into a model with income taxes only, creates substantial efficiency gains for the economy as whole, but at the cost of higher income inequality. In other words, consumption taxes reduce the progressivity of the tax system, and maybe, from a normative point of view, this result justifies the design of a set of subsidies policies which will aim to outweigh the regressive effects of the otherwise more efficient consumption taxes.

To many economists the public's support for the minimum wage (MW) institution is puzzling, since the MW is considered a "blunt instrument" for redistribution. To delve deeper in this issue we build models in which workers are heterogeneous in ability. In the first model, the government does not engage in any type of redistributive policies - except for the payment of unemployment benefits; we find that the MW is preferred by the majority of workers (even when the unemployed receive very generous unemployment benefits). In the second model, the government engages in redistribution through the public provision of private goods. We show that (i) the introduction of a MW can be preferred by a majority of workers only if the unemployed receive benefits which are substantially below the after-tax earnings they would have had in the perfectly competitive case, (ii) for a given generosity of the unemployment benefit scheme, the maximum, politically viable, MW is lower than in the absence of in-kind redistribution, and (iii) the MW institution is politically viable only when there is a limited degree of in-kind redistribution. These findings can possibly explain why a well-developed social safety net in Scandinavia tends to co-exist with the absence of a national MW, whereas in Southern Europe the MW institution "complements" the absence of a well-developed social safety net.

To many economists the public's support for the minimum wage (MW) institution is puzzling, since the MW is considered a "blunt instrument" for redistribution. To delve deeper in this issue we build models in which workers are heterogeneous in ability. In the first model, the government does not engage in any type of redistributive policies – except for the payment of unemployment benefits; we find that the MW is preferred by the majority of workers (even when the unemployed receive very generous unemployment benefits). In the second model, the government engages in redistribution through the public provision of private goods. We show that (i) the introduction of a MW can be preferred by a majority of workers only if the unemployed receive benefits which are substantially below the after-tax earnings they would have had in the perfectly competitive case, (ii) for a given generosity of the unemployment benefit scheme, the maximum, politically viable, MW is lower than in the absence of in-kind redistribution, and (iii) the MW institution is politically viable only when there is a limited degree of in-kind redistribution. These findings can possibly explain why a well-developed social safety net in Scandinavia tends to co-exist with the absence of a national MW, whereas in Southern Europe the MW institution "complements" the absence of a well-developed social safety net.