Alan Auerbach

Puma Biotechnology, Inc · Corporate

How do demand shocks affect the economy? We exploit detailed data on US defense spending to examine a large set of outcome variables in response to well-identified local demand shocks, jointly examining new outcomes (e.g., firm entry and housing rents) and other key macroeconomic outcomes and elasticities that previously have been estimated separat...

We evaluate the effects of inequality, fiscal policy, and COVID19 restrictions in a model of economic slack with potentially rigid capital operating costs. Rich households satiate their demand for goods/services (and consume an endowment on the margin), whereas poor households’ spending on goods/services is limited by their income (which in turn de...

This chapter sets out the key conceptual issues that arise in designing a business-level tax on profit in an international setting. It is in four parts—each addressing a basic question. First, what is meant by a tax on profit? We identify different approaches to taxing profit and show that there are a number of equivalences between taxes. Second, w...

This chapter describes and evaluates the current regime for taxing the profit of companies in an international setting. It explains its basis in domestic law and international treaties and sets out three of its distinguishing features: the distinctions between residence and source, between active and passive income, and its basis of separate accoun...

This chapter sets out and evaluates our second main proposal: the Destination-based Cash Flow Tax (DBCFT). This has two basic components: (a) a ‘cash flow’ element, which gives immediate relief to all expenditure, and (b) a ‘destination-based’ element, which introduces border adjustments of the same form as under the value added tax (VAT): exports...

This chapter sets out our first detailed reform proposal: the Residual Profit Allocation by Income (RPAI). This is one of a family of schemes based on separating multinational profit into ‘routine’ and ‘residual’ profit, a distinction that exists under the current system. The RPAI allocates the right to tax routine profit to the country where funct...

In this chapter we explain the broad approach taken in the two detailed proposals set out in Chapters 6 and 7, namely the RPAI and DBCFT respectively. We discuss the extent to which international coordination would be required, or desired. We then consider the costs of transition to a new system. In broad terms, we can compare incremental reforms w...

This book undertakes a fundamental review of the existing international regime for taxing business profit. It steps back from the current political debates on how to combat profit shifting and how taxing rights over the profits of the digitalized economy should be allocated. Instead, it starts from first principles to ask how we should evaluate a t...

This chapter sets out and evaluates a number of possible reform options; we group options by four broad locations in which profit could be taxed. First, profit could in principle be taxed in the country of residence of the owners of the business. A second option is the country of residence of the parent company or business headquarters. A third opt...

This book undertakes a fundamental review of the existing international regime for taxing business profit. It steps back from the current political debates on how to combat profit shifting and how taxing rights over the profits of the digitalized economy should be allocated. Instead, it starts from first principles to ask how we should evaluate a t...

This book undertakes a fundamental review of the existing international regime for taxing business profit. It steps back from the current political debates on how to combat profit shifting and how taxing rights over the profits of the digitalized economy should be allocated. Instead, it starts from first principles to ask how we should evaluate a t...

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) significantly changed federal income taxation, including limiting SALT (state and local property, income, and sales taxes) deductibility to $10,000. We estimate the TCJA’s differential effect on red- and blue-state taxpayers and the SALT limitation’s contribution to this differential. We find an average incr...

We examine the impact of COVID-19 on the federal budget outlook. We find substantial but temporary effects on spending and revenues, with more moderate but permanent effects on the long-term projections. We project that the debt-to-GDP ratio, currently 98%, will rise to 190% in 2050 under current law, compared to a CBO pre-COVID projection of 180%....

Credit markets typically freeze in recessions: access to credit declines, and the cost of credit increases. A conventional policy response is to rely on monetary tools to saturate financial markets with liquidity. Given limited space for monetary policy in the current economic conditions, we study how fiscal stimulus can influence local credit mark...

We estimate local fiscal multipliers and spillovers for the USA using a rich dataset based on the US Department of Defense contracts and a variety of outcome variables relating to income and employment. We find strong positive spillovers across locations and industries. Both backward linkages and general equilibrium effects (e.g., income multiplier...

This paper considers the implications of the destination-based cash flow tax (DBCFT) for three common ways of shifting taxable profits between countries: through manipulation of transfer prices, the use of debt, and locating intangible assets in low taxed jurisdictions. It shows that none of these planning devices would be available under a DBCFT,...

In this paper, we estimate government purchase multipliers for Japan, following the approach used previously for a panel of OECD countries (Auerbach and Gorodnichenko, 2013). This approach allows multipliers to vary smoothly according to the state of the economy and uses real-time forecast data to purge policy innovations of their predictable compo...

Older Americans have experienced dramatic gains in life expectancy in recent decades, but an emerging literature reveals that these gains are accumulating mostly to those at the top of the income distribution. We explore how growing inequality in life expectancy affects lifetime benefits from Social Security, Medicare and other programmes and how t...

Many, if not most, baby boomers appear at risk of suffering a major decline in their living standard in retirement. With federal and state government finances far too encumbered to significantly raise Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits, boomers must look to their own devices to rescue their retirements, namely, working harder and long...

With the Great Recession leaving nearly all advanced economies with substantially higher debt–gross domestic product ratios, this paper re-evaluates the long-term fiscal sustainability of these economies based on current estimates of their current-policy fiscal trajectories. Through measuring fiscal imbalance, we find that for many countries, short...

Although theoretical models consistently predict that government spending shocks should lead to appreciation of the domestic currency, empirical studies have regularly found depreciation. Using daily data on U.S. defense spending (announced and actual payments), the paper documents that the dollar immediately and strongly appreciates after announce...

In his influential book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty argues forcefully that rising wealth and wealth inequality is an inherent characteristic of capitalist economies and calls for strong policy responses, in particular a substantial wealth tax implemented globally. This paper takes issue with the facts, logic, and policy con...

Atkinson and Sandmo (1980) evaluated the taxation of saving by embedding the static optimal-tax framework within the two-period overlapping-generations model. Using this model, they collected a series of important results for optimal taxes on labour and capital income under a variety of assumptions regarding the instruments and objectives of the go...

There has been considerable research and discussion over the years about the potential role of fiscal rules in supporting better economic outcomes; the design, implementation and enforcement, of such rules; and the prospects for alternative fiscal and political institutions to promote the objectives to which fiscal rules are typically targeted. Thi...

This chapter examines the size of fiscal multipliers amidst an economic recession, first estimating multipliers for a large number of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. Second, it adapts the authors' previous methodology to use direct projections rather than the standard structural vector autoregression (SVAR) a...

This paper reviews the recent evolution of thinking and evidence regarding the effectiveness of activist fiscal policy, including how policy multipliers might vary with respect to economic conditions. Like many other countries that were hit by the “Great Recession,” the USA responded initially with active fiscal policy measures. But a more positive...

In this paper, we estimate the cross-country spillover effects of government purchases on output for a large number of OECD countries. Following the methodology in Auerbach and Gorodnichenko (2012a, b), we allow these multipliers to vary smoothly according to the state of the economy and use real-time forecast data to purge policy innovations of th...

The recently completed Mirrlees Review focuses on reforming the UK tax system. It represents an unusual blend of "best practice" application of economic theory and evidence to realistic policy design; it lays out policy proposals with sufficient justification and specificity that they go well beyond a statement of principles for reform. This paper...

conference on Fiscal and Monetary Policy Challenges in the

We model the effects of consumption-type taxes which differ according to the base and location of the tax. Our model incorporates a monopolist producing and selling in two countries with three sources of rent, each in a different location: a fixed factor (located with production), mobile managerial skill, and a monopoly mark-up (located with consum...

As the world economy slowly recovers from the very deep and widespread recession of recent years, many countries confront very serious fiscal imbalances. How much time they have to deal with these imbalances is a central question, the salience of which can only have been increased by the ongoing fiscal crisis and bailout in Greece and the immediate...

In this paper, we estimate government purchase multipliers for a large number of OECD countries, allowing these multipliers to vary smoothly according to the state of the economy and using real-time forecast data to purge policy innovations of their predictable components. We adapt our previous methodology (Auerbach and Gorodnichenko, 2011) to use...

No abstract available.

The authors thank Ben Harris for his varied contributions to the project and Ilana Fischer for research assistance. All opinions and any mistakes are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the staff, officers, or trustees of any of the institutions with which they are affiliated. This paper has been revised to take into account the Ob...

This paper discusses the impact of recent tumultuous economic events and policy interventions on the Federal fiscal picture for the immediate future and for the longer run. In 2009, the federal deficit will be larger as a share of the economy than at any time since World War II. The current deficit is due in part to economic weakness and the stimul...

Using stochastic simulations we analyze how public pension structures spread the risks arising from demographic and economic shocks across generations. We consider several actual and hypothetical sustainable PAYGO pension structures, including: (1) versions of the US Social Security system with annual adjustments of taxes or benefits to maintain fi...

During and after the "Great Recession" that began in December 2007 the U.S. federal government enacted several rounds of activist fiscal policy. In this paper, we review the recent evolution of thinking and evidence regarding the effectiveness of activist fiscal policy. Although fiscal interventions aimed at stimulating and stabilizing the economy...

We provide new estimates of the federal budget outlook over 10-year and long-term horizons under three sets of assumptions: the Congressional Budget Office baseline, which assumes no changes in current law; an extended policy scenario, in which it is assumed that future Congresses act more or less like previous Congresses in extending expiring prov...

Public finance has both normative and positive elements, and moving between theory and practice requires attention to help us understand both what policies government should adopt and whether it is likely to do so. We should not be surprised when bad policies are adopted in spite of better policies being available if our political system is structu...

Za većinu posmatrača trenutna recesija kreira neodoljive okolnosti za obnavljanje aktivizma fiskalne politike. Ali, snažna podrška diskrecionoj fiskalnoj politici predstavlja odraz obnovljenog poverenja prema aktivnijoj ekonomskoj politici koje je postojalo i pre sadašnje krize. Medjutim, nedavne debate o mogućim intervencijama fiskalne politike su...

A key issue in current research and policy is the size of fiscal multipliers when the economy is in recession. Using a variety of methods and data sources, we provide three insights. First, using regime-switching models, we estimate effects of tax and spending policies that can vary over the business cycle; we find large differences in the size of...

We introduce a new hybrid approach to joint estimation of Value at Risk (VaR) and Expected Shortfall (ES) for high quantiles of return distributions. We investigate the relative performance of VaR and ES models using daily returns for sixteen stock market indices (eight from developed and eight from emerging markets) prior to and during the 2008 fi...

Although this year's record deficit has attracted a lot of attention, the real concern is the unsustainability of the federal budget over the next 10 years and longer. The budget situation presents policy makers with a very delicate balancing act between encouraging economic recovery and establishing fiscal sustainability, according to Alan Auerbac...

This paper reviews recent economic events and their impact on U.S. fiscal performance and prospects. We highlight the historic nature of the 2009 budget outcomes, the unsustainability of plausible ten-year budget projections, and the increasingly dire long-term fiscal problem. These conditions leave federal policy makers with difficult choices. Ove...

We consider the fiscal multiplier and spillover in an environment in which two countries are caught simultaneously in a liquidity trap. Using an optimizing two-country sticky price model, we show that the fiscal multiplier and spillover are contrary to those predicted in textbook economics. For the country with government expenditure, the fiscal mu...

Although this year's record deficit has attracted a lot of attention, the real concern is the unsustainability of the federal budget over the next 10 years and longer. The budget situation presents policy makers with a very delicate balancing act between encouraging economic recovery and establishing fiscal sustainability, according to Alan Auerbac...

Like many other developed economies, the United States has imposed fiscal rules in attempting to impose a degree of fiscal discipline on the political process of budget determination. The federal government has operated under a series of budget control regimes that have been complex in nature and of debatable impact. Much of the complexity of these...

This paper considers what fiscal targets the government should use to achieve long-term fiscal objectives. Among its findings are: 1. At least three important and possibly conflicting long-term objectives are associated with concerns about debt and deficits: intergenerational equity, economic performance, and fiscal sustainability. 2. If government...

We introduce a new hybrid approach to joint estimation of Value at Risk (VaR) and Expected Shortfall (ES) for high quantiles of return distributions. We investigate the relative performance of VaR and ES models using daily returns for sixteen stock market indices (eight from developed and eight from emerging markets) prior to and during the 2008 fi...

Following Meade (1978), we reconsider issues in the design of taxes on corporate income. We outline developments in economies and in economic thought over the last thirty years, and investigate how these developments should affect the design of taxes on corporate income. We consider a number of tax systems which have been proposed, distinguishing t...

Around the world, Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGO) public pension programs face serious long-term fiscal problems due primarily to actual and projected population aging, and most appear unsustainable as currently structured. Some have proposed the replacement of such plans with systems of fully funded private or personal Defined Contribution (DC) accounts, bu...

It has now been nearly three decades since the publication of two important volumes that laid out many of the details of how one might implement a progressive consumption tax (Institute for Fiscal Studies, 1978; U.S. Treasury, 1977). Over the years since, many contributions have analyzed the mechanics of the different variants of consumption taxati...

Recent studies argue that the spread-adjusted Taylor rule (STR), which includes a response to the credit spread, replicates monetary policy in the United State. We show (1) STR is a theoretically optimal monetary policy under heterogeneous loan interest rate contracts in both discretionay and commitment monetary policies, (2) however, the optimal r...

This paper reassesses the long-term fiscal position of Korea using Generational Accounting, modified to reflect the special features of the Korean fiscal situation, such as prospective changes in public pension benefit profiles and social welfare expenditures due to the maturing of public pensions, increasing demand for social welfare expenditures,...

Governments around the world have struggled to find the right method of controlling public spending and budget deficits. In recent years, the United States has evaluated policy changes using a ten-year budget window. The use of a multi-year window is intended to capture the future effects of policies, the notion being that a budget window that is t...

This paper was presented as the 2006 IFS Annual Lecture in London on 4 September. The author is grateful to Anne Moore for research assistance and to Ethan Auerbach, Len Burman, Michael Graetz, Jim Hines, Joel Slemrod, Al Warren and an anonymous referee for helpful discussions and comments on earlier drafts.

Abstract Confronting a prolonged period of slow growth, Japan has recently faced a difficult policy environment, with large budget deficits apparently precluding the use of traditional fiscal stimulus, and zero short-term interest rates apparently precluding the use of traditional monetary stimulus. This paper reconsiders each of these conclusions....

This paper reviews what we know from economic theory and evidence about who bears the burden of the corporate income tax. Among the lessons from the recent literature are: 1. For a variety of reasons, shareholders may bear a certain portion of the corporate tax burden. In the short run, they may be unable to shift taxes on corporate capital. Even i...

Introduction On June 20th, 2003, President Bush signed the JGTRA03 into law. This act contained a number of significant tax provisions, but the most noteworthy may have been the changes in the dividend and capital gains tax rates. The top capital gains rate of 20 percent was reduced to 15 percent. The top rate on dividend income was reduced from th...

This paper investigates the effects of capital gains and dividend tax rates on excess returns around announcements of dividend increases and ex-dividend days for U.S. cor-porations. We find that, consistent with standard models, the ex-dividend day premium increased from 2002 to 2004 when the dividend tax rate was cut. Consistent with the signallin...

Prevalent thinking about liquidity traps suggests that the perfect substitutability of money and bonds at a zero short-term nominal interest rate renders open-market operations ineffective for achieving macroeconomic stabilization goals. We show that even were this the case, there remains a powerful argument for large-scale open market operations a...

This paper uses generational accounting to assess the fiscal impacts of Korean reunification. Our findings suggest that early reunification will result in a large increase in the fiscal burden for most current and future generations of South Koreans. The Korean reunification's fiscal impact appears much larger than that of German reunification, due...

Alan Auerbach assesses the report of the Presidential Panel on Federal Tax Reform. He finds much good, some bad, and too much missing. Although the reform mission is not yet accomplished he favors Congress pursuing serious tax reform.

The unusual behavior of investment in the 1990s and early 2000s—abnormally high investment in the 1990s and abnormally low investment in the 2000s, despite several major tax cuts intended to stimulate investment — prompts two questions that we tackle in this paper: Did "capital overhang" contribute to the dramatic investment collapse of the early 2...

Prevalent thinking about liquidity traps suggests that the perfect substitutability of money and bonds at a zero short-term nominal interest rate renders open-market operations ineffective for achieving macroeconomic stabilization goals. In an earlier paper, we showed that this reasoning does not hold, that open-market operations can provide substa...

A central point in the recent debate about Social Security in the United States has been the extent to which the federal government should take significant positions in the equity market. But, as this paper shows, the government already has a much more significant, if implicit position in the U.S. equity market through its claim to future tax reven...

Prevalent thinking about liquidity traps suggests that the perfect substitutability of money and bonds at a zero short-term nominal interest rate renders open-market operations ineffective for achieving macroeconomic stabilization goals. We show that even were this the case, there remains a powerful argument for large-scale open market operations a...

This paper begins with a review of the current fiscal situation and the causes of its recent deterioration. As a guide to possible policy actions, it provides extensive estimates of past responses of revenues and expenditures at the federal and state and local level. Estimates at the federal level suggest that policy is responsive to both economic...

Essays on the theory and practice of public finance and policy. The sixteen essays in this book were written to celebrate the ninetieth birthday of Richard Musgrave and to commemorate the tenth anniversary of CES, the Center for Economic Studies at the University of Munich. Musgrave is considered to be a founding father of modern public economics....

Originally published in 2003, this book contains fifteen major essays on international economics. The authors investigate five principal themes: theory, and empirics, of financial issues in open economies; economic growth; public economies; and political economy. Written to honor Professor Assaf Razin of Tel Aviv and Cornell Universities on the occ...

le budget, current practice falls short of what would be desirable. First, the budget uses assumptions defining current tax and spending policy that are widely regarded as unrealistic. Second, official budget projections employ a ten-year horizon. 2 Practical considerations make some such limit necessary, as projections become increasingly speculat...

Alan J Auerbach and Roger H Gordon in their paper 'Taxation of Financial Services under a VAT,' attempt to determine how a Value-Added Tax (VAT) should indulge in financial transactions. Their argument is based on the fact that the reliability of fundamental objectives of VAT is crucial for the treatment of financial transactions. Adopting this app...

This chapter reviews the theory and evidence regarding the impact of taxation on corporate financial policy. Starting from a basic characterization of the classical corporate income tax and its effects, the analysis focuses on three areas of research: equity policy, debt-equity decisions, and choices regarding ownership structure and organizational...

This paper examines the evolution of the corporate profit base and the relationship between book income and tax income for U.S. corporations over last two decades. The paper demonstrates that this relationship has broken down over the 1990s and has broken down in a manner that is consistent with increased sheltering activity. The paper traces the g...

This paper reviews the state of discretionary fiscal policy. Among its findings are: (1) In recent years, U.S. discretionary fiscal policy appears to have become more active in response to both cyclical conditions and a simple measure of budget balance. (2) Considerable uncertainty remains about how large an impact discretionary fiscal policy has o...