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Unemployment remains a major problem for economic policy at the beginning of the millennium. Taxes and Unemployment investigates how tax policy affects labor market outcomes in industrialized countries and to what extent it can be used to combat unemployment. In particular, the wage and employment consequences of tax rate variations, the impact of changes in tax progression and of comprehensive tax reforms are analyzed. It is shown that the employment effects of tax policy depend crucially on the institutional features of the labor market. These features are often country-specific and include the strength of collective bargaining institutions relative to other mechanisms of wage determination, the tax treatment of the jobless, the legal incidence of taxes and the exact specification of the tax system. Therefore, Taxes and Unemployment advocates an approach to reducing unemployment which is tailored to the specific characteristics of labor markets. Moreover, the analysis indicates that tax reforms need to be supported by other policy measures to regain full employment

AbstractVariations in company taxes are analysed for a right‐to‐manage model, an efficient bargaining setting and a seniority approach. Taxes cannot be shifted forward by the risk‐neutral firm. Alternative income and bargaining power are allowed to vary with taxes. Employing asymmetric Nash solution it is found that changes in a payroll, revenue or profit tax can have differing implications for labour demand curve models and efficient bargaining solutions. This distinction might provide a novel basis for empirical work. Variations in bargaining power and‐within a labour demand curve setting‐the union's objective function do not change results.

Based on interviews and a questionnaire answered by 25 factory directors in November 1988 in the PRC, this paper investigates director-level and enterprise-level factors that affect the bargaining power of Chinese factories. It shows that directors of larger, higher-ranking factories feel they are more successful in preserving autonomy and gaining exemptions and concessions from their supervisory agencies on salary and bonus pools and distribution, tax rates, and cadre personnel decisions. (DÜI-Sen)

We construct a political equilibrium in which employers and labour unions bargain over labour contracts, wage-earners and profit-earners lobby the government for taxation and labour market regulation, and labour market legislation must be accepted by the majority of voters. We show that the voters rule out profit sharing, because otherwise the government would capture all the gain. Furthermore, if it is much easier to tax wages than profits, then the government protects union power by regulation in the labour market. In such a case, the political equilibrium is characterized by strong union power and right-to-manage bargaining, which causes involuntary unemployment.

Coase's seminal 1960 paper on externalities is associated with the so-called Coase Theorem which is stated in the literature in many forms. However, its main thrust was less to state a theorem than to challenge Pigou's earlier insistence on the need for government intervention through Pigouvian taxes to achieve internalisation of externalities. Coase argued instead that private party bargaining can be relied upon to internalise externalities, but equally insisted that establishing clear and firm property rights is a precondition to successful internalisation achieving bargaining. Similar thinking has lead to clear definitions of property rights becoming a key part of World Bank conditionality in the environmental area. This paper discusses the underpinnings of this position, arguing that it is little researched and subject to challenge. We first show how Coase only considered one type of property right, and where others such as compensation rights are allowed for the property right assignment will itself directly achieve internalisation with no need for further bargaining. We also show how ambiguous property rights can dominate a clear assignment of property rights for a case where recipients of damage can move to avoid damage, but must remain and actually receive damage in order to be recipients of compensation. Rights to either polluters to pollute, or to recipients of damage to compensation create a distortion; and either outcome is dominated by no assignment of property rights, but a tax on polluters (Pigouvian tax) with revenues redistributed equally to the whole population.

This paper deals with the issue of whether the Revenue Service (RS) should be allowed, or even encouraged, to negotiate settlement agreements with taxpayers subject to examination. We consider the case in which the RS enjoys discretion at the settlement stage, its stance being guided by officers' professional judgment. We show that discretionary settlements serve a desirable function, as they allow the RS to better exploit taxpayer‐specific information and to take advantage of the bargaining power it can wield at the negotiation stage.

Various taxes influence wage and employment outcomes in efficiency wage models. These findings are extended by incorporating more comprehensive tax functions, additional tax parameters, union-firm wage bargaining, and balanced budget restrictions. Moreover, the importance of different effort functions is evaluated. It is shown that higher marginal tax rates, holding constant the level of taxes, reduce wages and increase employment. Higher level of taxes on income, labour cost and value-added can raise unemployment.

One may view current Canadian tax reform as an episode in a tax reform cycle arising from a continual public choice game. Both the positions of the Canadian players and the rules of the game may provide a rationale for these reforms. Revenue, equity, efficiency, and bargaining constraints determine the evolution of the tax code.

In a social custom model of union membership with wage bargaining, higher levels of company taxes lower wages while having uncertain employment effects. A higher marginal income tax rate increases employment. Changes solely in the level of income taxation, retaining marginal rates, have ambiguous wage and employment consequences. Endogenising union membership therefore does not alter the effects of tax changes in comparison to a right-to-manage model with exogenously fixed level of density.

OECD economies were able to reconcile the pursuit of welfare state expansion and full employment during the first decades of the postwar period. Yet the trade-off between these two policy objectives widened in recent decades. To explore the question ofwhy this change occurred, this article extends familiar models of wage determination by adding a number of parameters that capture cross-national differences among welfare states. The model identifies the conditions under which unions deliver wage moderation in exchange for social policy benefits and transfers and explores how different labor-market institutions magnify or decrease the impact of wage choices on the equilibrium level of employment. Next, the author examines the impact of changes in the composition of social policy expenditures and in the level of the tax burden on. unions' wage choices. She shows that mature welfare states, characterized by high tax burdens and a high share of transfers devoted to labor-market outsiders, reduce the effectiveness ofwage moderation in lowering unemployment. The author tests the main propositions using OECD panel data for the period 1960–95.