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Should Fiscal Policy be different in a Non-Competitive Framework?
Abstract
This paper studies if imperfections in the labor market justify a different fiscal policy. We present a dynamic general equilibrium model with a Ramsey planner deciding about public spending, labor taxes and debt. Two different labor market setups are considered. First we assume a competitive labor market and then we introduce a union with monopoly power. Both models reach the same conclusion as regards to the cyclical properties of the optimal policy: it is not optimal to implement a countercyclical fiscal policy. We also find that government spending should be larger under perfect competition. These main results arise both under complete and incomplete markets for the debt.
This paper studies an international tax policy design problem by employing a two-country dynamic general equilibrium model with incomplete asset markets. We investigate the possibility of welfareimproving active tax policies, in particular capital and labor income tax, under the non-cooperative Nash equilibrium and the cooperative equilibrium. Unlike the conventional wisdom regarding stabilization policies, optimal tax policies in our economy are procyclical. Relative to the non-cooperative setting, international tax policy cooperation requires more active tax policies (about two times) and generates large extra welfare gains (by about a third).
This paper investigates the exploitation of natural resources in a growing
economy within a second-best fiscal policy framework. Agents derive utility from two
types of consumption goods—one which relies on a natural resource input and one
which does not—as well as from leisure and from natural resource amenity values.
We connect second best policy to essential components of utility by considering the
elasticity of substitution among each of the four utility arguments. The results illustrate
potentially important relationships between amenity values and leisure. When
amenity values are complementary with leisure, for instance when natural resources
are used for recreation, optimal taxes on goods produced with natural resources
generally increase over time. On the other hand, optimal taxes on goods produced
from natural resources generally decrease over time when leisure and amenity values
are substitutes. Under some parameterizations, complex dynamics leading to nonmonotonic
time paths can emerge
This paper studies the dynamics of state-contingent government debt in the case that the fiscal authority cannot commit to a policy in the future. Under commitment, optimal policy calls for letting debt follow a stationary process and take values that depend on the initial outstanding liabilities. In contrast, in the case that the fiscal authority lacks the ability to commit, it modifies its policy tools, i.e. the tax rates and government spending, to lower the intertemporal price of consumption goods available in the current period, i.e. the real interest rate, with the aim of lowering the intertemporal value of its current outstanding liabilities. Over time, this drives government debt and the economy toward a region where no policy action by the fiscal authority can lower the real interest rate any longer.
This paper analyzes whether a minimum wage can be an optimal redistribution policy when distorting taxes and lump-sum transfers are also available in a competitive economy. We build a static general equilibrium model with a Ramsey planner making decisions on taxes, transfers, and minimum wage levels. Workers are assumed to differ only in their productivity. We find that optimal redistribution may imply the use of a minimum wage. The key factor driving our results is the reaction of the demand for low skilled labor to the minimum wage law. Hence, an optimal minimum wage appears to be most likely when low skilled households are scarce, the complementarity between the two types of workers is large or the difference in productivity is small. The main contribution of the paper is a modelling approach that allows us to adopt analysis and solution techniques widely used in recent public finance research. Moreover, this modelling strategy is flexible enough to allow for potential extensions to include dynamics into the model.
This paper investigates optimal fiscal policy in a static multisector model. A Ramsey type planner chooses tax rates on each good type as well as spending levels on each good type subject to an exogenous total expenditure constraint. It is shown that, like taxes, government spending policy has price effects and that these price effects have significant implications for optimal policy. These price effects imply a U shape to the government's objective function and this U shape results in boundary values for the choice of the spending allocation. In particular, it is shown that the optimal allocation of government spending tends to be concentrated on one good rather than spread among many goods. Copyright © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc..
This paper studies the use of a minimum wage law to implement the optimal redistribution policy when a distorting tax-transfer scheme is also available. We build a static general equilibrium model with a Ramsey planner making decisions on taxes, transfers, and minimum wage levels. Workers are assumed to di.er only in their productivity. We find that optimal redistribution may imply the use of only taxes and transfers, only a minimum wage or the proper combination of both policies. The key factor driving our results is the reaction of the demand for low skilled labor to the minimum wage law. Hence, an optimal minimum wage appears to be most likely when low skilled households are scarce, the complementarity between the two types of workers is large or the di.erence in productivity is small.
Using three waves of data from the European Community Household Panel this paper estimates demand for health equations for 12 European Countries. The focus is on three specific points: i) the identification of behavioural imilarities and differences in the demand for health across the countries; ii) the variability of the demand for health captured through a joint model for all the countries; iii) the selection of the most appropriate econometric specification for visits to general practitioners and to specialists among two-part and latent class models. We find that there are significant differences across countries, although there are also similarities in the effect of variables such as the health stock, income or family structure. We also find some differences between the behaviour of men and women mainly in the decisions to visit and the number of visits to specialists. The results also suggest that latent class models are more appropriate than two-part models to estimate the general practitioners equations while the opposite is found for visits to the specialists.
This paper studies optimal tax policy design problem by employing a two-country dynamic general equilibrium model with incomplete asset markets. We investigate the possibility of welfare-improving active, contingent tax policies (tax rates respond to changes in productivity) on consumption, and capital and labor income taxes. Unlike the conventional wisdom regarding stabilization policies, procyclical factor income tax policy is optimal in open economy. Procyclical tax policy generates efficiency gains by correcting market incompleteness. Optimal tax policy under cooperative equilibrium is similar to that under the Nash equilibrium and welfare gains from tax policy coordination is quite small.
Interest on the factors shaping migrants’ use of a given money transmittal method has recently intensified following researchers agreement on the often inadequate infrastructure surrounding remittances transfers. This concern has also captured the attention of government officials, who appear more eager to promote more efficient and safe transfers of emigrant’s earnings given the potential that remittances hold for increasing resources at the disposal of receiving nations. This paper uses data from mexican immigrants who have resided in the United States to examine the various factors that shape migrants’ use of the various methods to remit earnings to Mexico. The analysis reveals that accessibility factors and migrants’ awareness of alternative remitting methods play a key role in explaining their use of the various money transfer mechanisms.
Corruption in the public sector erodes tax compliance and leads to higher tax evasion. Moreover, corrupt public officials abuse their public power to extort bribes from the private agents. In both types of interaction with the public sector, the private agents are bound to face uncertainty with respect to their disposable incomes. To analyse effects of this uncertainty, a stochastic dynamic growth model with the public sector is examined. It is shown that deterministic excessive red tape and corruption deteriorate the growth potential through income redistribution and public sector inefficiencies. Most importantly, it is demonstrated that the increase in corruption via higher uncertainty exerts adverse effects on capital accumulation, thus leading to lower growth rates.
One of the main arguments against a public finance solution to unemployment is that, at least in the long run, the tax burden is passed onto labor. This paper assesses the robustness of existing propositions on the relation between tax progressivity and the labor market in an OLG general equilibrium framework that has not been previously used to address the tax progressivity issue. The ambiguity of our qualitative results clearly indicates that the determination of the macroeconomics effects of tax progressivity is an empirical question. On the basis of a calibration exercise for Italy and the US, the macroeconomics effects are determined and quantified. In particular, by looking at the labor market, larger employment effects are triggered by a reduction in both the average (personal income/payroll) tax rates.
Economic theories of managing renewable resources, such as fisheries and forestry, traditionally assume that individual harvesters are perfectly rational and thus able to compute the harvesting strategy that maximizes their discounted profits. The current paper presents an alternative approach based on bounded rationality and evolutionary mechanisms. It is assumed that individual harvesters face a choice between two harvesting strategies. The evolution of the distribution of strategies in the population is modeled through a replicator dynamics equation. The latter captures the idea that strategies yielding above average profits are demanded more than strategies yielding below average profits, so that the first type ends up accounting for a larger part in the population. From a mathematical perspective, the combination of resource and evolutionary processes leads to complex dynamics. The paper presents the existence and stability conditions for each steady-state of the system and analyzes dynamic paths to the equilibrium. In addition, effects of changes in prices are analyzed. A main result of the paper is that under certain conditions both strategies can survive in the long-run.
This discussion paper has resulted in a publication in the Journal of Evolutionary Economics , 2003, 13(2), 183-200.
This paper develops the quantitative implications of optimal fiscal policy in a business cycle model. In a stationary equilibrium, the ex ante tax rate on capital income is approximately zero. The tax rate on labor income fluctuates very little and inherits the persistence properties of the exogenous shocks; thus there is no presumption that optimal labor tax rates follow a random walk. Most of the welfare gains realized by switching from a tax system like that of the United States to the Ramsey system come from an initial period of high taxation on capital income. Copyright 1994 by University of Chicago Press.
The authors study the problem of optimal taxation in three infinite-horizon, representative-agent endogenous growth models. The first model is a convex model in which physical and human capital are perfectly symmetric. The authors' second model incorporates elastic labor supply through a Lucas-style technology. Analysis of these two models points out the danger of assuming that government expenditures are exogenous. In their third model, the authors include government expenditures as a productive input in capital formation, showing that the limiting tax rate on capital is no longer zero. In numerical simulations, they find similar effects on growth and welfare in all three models. Copyright 1993 by University of Chicago Press.
In this paper a unified framework is developed for modeling imperfect competition in a monopolistic economy in a dynamic setting. Concentrating on the steady state analysis, a graphical approach is developed in consumption/leisure space. In both cases, there is a distortion towards leisure and away from consumption/work. The unionized economy is dynamically efficient, in the sense that the marginal product of capital equals discount rate. However, the monopolistic economy is not: the marginal product of capital exceeds the discount rate. This enables us to compare the outcomes in terms of productivity, utility and employment.
Hours worked and the return to working are weakly correlated. Traditionally, the ability to account for this fact has been a litmus test for macroeconomic models. Existing real-business-cycle models fail this test dramatically. The authors modify prototypical real-business-cycle models by allowing government consumption shocks to influence labor-market dynamics. This modification can, in principle, bring the models into closer conformity with the data. Their empirical results indicate that it does. Copyright 1992 by American Economic Association.
This paper is concerned with the structure and time-consistency of optimal fiscal and monetary policy in an economy without capital. In a dynamic context, optimal taxation means distributing tax distortions over time in a welfare-maximizing way. For a barter economy, our main finding is that with debt commitments of sufficiently rich maturity structure, an optimal policy, if one exists, is time-consistent. In a monetary economy, the idea of optimal taxation must be broadened to include an ‘inflation tax’, and we find that time-consistency does not carry over. An optimal ‘inflation tax’ requires commitment by ‘rules’ in a sense that has no counterpart in the dynamic theory of ordinary excise taxes. The reason time-consistency fails in a monetary economy is that nominal assets should, from a welfare-maximizing point of view, always be taxed away via an immediate inflation in a kind of ‘capital levy’. This emerges as a new possibility when money is introduced into an economy without capital.
Within a rational expectations framework, policy has effect if it alters relative prices and policy evaluations are exercises in modern public finance theory. The time inconsistency of an optimal taxation plan precludes the use of standard control theory for its determination. In this article recursive methods are developed that overcome this difficulty. The technique is novel in that the constraint set as well as the value function are determined recursively. Even though there is little hope of the optimal plan being implemented - because of its time inconsistency - we think the exercise is of more than pedagogical interest. The optimal plan's return is a benchmark with which to compare the time consistent solution under alternative institutional constraints which society might choose to impose upon itself.
We show that the steady-state optimal tax on capital income can be negative, positive, or zero in a neoclassical growth model that allows for imperfectly competitive product markets. The sign of the optimal tax rate depends crucially on (1) the degree of monopoly power, (2) the extent to which monopoly profits can be taxed, (3) the size of the depreciation allowance, and (4) the magnitude of government expenditures. For an empirically plausible set of parameters, we find that the steady-state optimal capital tax can range between −10 and 22%.
We analyse the implications of optimal taxation for the stochastic behaviour of debt. We show that when a government pursues an optimal fiscal policy under complete markets, the value of debt has the same or less persistence than other variables in the economy and it declines in response to shocks that cause the deficit to increase. By contrast, under incomplete markets debt shows more persistence than other variables and it increases in response to shocks that cause a higher deficit. Data for US government debt reveals diametrically opposite results from those of complete markets and is much more supportive of bond market incompleteness.
We formulate an optimizing-agent model in which both labor and product markets exhibit monopolistic competition and staggered nominal contracts. The unconditional expectation of average household utility can be expressed in terms of the unconditional variances of the output gap, price inflation, and wage inflation. Monetary policy cannot achieve the Pareto-optimal equilibrium that would occur under completely flexible wages and prices; that is, the model exhibits a tradeoff in stabilizing the output gap, price inflation, and wage inflation. We characterize the optimal policy rule for reasonable calibrations of the model. We also find that strict price inflation targeting generates relatively large welfare losses, whereas several other simple policy rules perform nearly as well as the optimal rule.
We provide an introduction to optimal fiscal and monetary policy using the primal approach to optimal taxation. We use this approach to address how fiscal and monetary policy should be set over the long run and over the business cycle. We find four substantive lessons for policymaking: Capital income taxes should be high initially and then roughly zero; tax rates on labor and consumption should be roughly constant; state-contingent taxes on assets should be used to provide insurance against adverse shocks; and monetary policy should be conducted so as to keep nominal interest rates close to zero. We begin optimal taxation in a static context. We then develop a general framework to analyze optimal fiscal policy. Finally, we analyze optimal monetary policy in three commonly used models of money: a cash-credit economy, a money-in-the-utility-function economy, and a shopping-time economy.
The authors propose a definition of time-consistent policy for infinite-horizon economies with competitive private agents. Allocations and policies are defined as functions of the history of past policies. A sustainable equilibrium is a sequence of history-contingent policies and allocations that satisfy certain sequential optimality conditions for the government and for private agents. The authors provide a complete characterization of the sustainable equilibrium outcomes for a variant of Stanley Fischer's model of capital taxation. They also relate their work to recent developments in the theory of repeated games. Copyright 1990 by University of Chicago Press.
A public debt theory is constructed in which the Ricardian invariance theorem is valid as a first-order proposition but where the dependence excess burden on the timing of taxation implies an optimal time path of debt issue. A central proposition is that deficits are varied in order to maintain expected constancy in tax rates. This behavior implies a positive effect on debt issue of temporary increases in government spending (as in wartime), a countercyclical response of debt to temporary income movements, and a one-to-one effect of expected inflation on nominal debt growth. Debt issue would be invariant with the outstanding debt-income ratio and, except for a mirror effect, with the level of government spending. Hypotheses are tested on U.S. data since World War I. Results are basically in accord with the theory. It also turns out that a small set of explanatory variables can account for the principal movements in interest-bearing federal debt since the 1920s.
In an economy studied by Lucas and Stokey, tax rates inherit the serial correlation structure of government expenditures, belying Barro's earlier result that taxes should be a random walk for any stochastic process of government expenditures. To recover a version of Barro's random walk tax-smoothing outcome, we modify Lucas and Stokey's economy to permit only risk-free debt. Having only risk-free debt confronts the Ramsey planner with additional constraints on equilibrium allocations beyond one imposed by Lucas and Stokey's assumption of complete markets. The Ramsey outcome blends features of Barro's model with Lucas and Stokey's. In our model, the contemporaneous effects of exogenous government expenditures on the government deficit and taxes resemble those in Lucas and Stokey's model, but incomplete markets put a nearunit root component into government debt and taxes, an outcome like Barro's. However, we show that without ad hoc limits on the government's asset holdings, outcomes can diverge in important ways from Barro's. Our results use and extend recent advances in the consumption-smoothing literature.
Within the rational expectations framework, policy has effect if it alters relative prices and policy evaluations are exercises in modern public finance theory. The time inconsistency of an optimal taxation plan precludes the use of standard control theory for its determination. This article recursive methods are developed that overcome this difficulty. The technique is novel in that the constraint set as well as the value function are determined recursively. Even though there is little hope of the optimal plan being implemented - because of its time inconsistency - we think the exercise is of more than pedagogical interest. The optimal plan's return is a benchmark with which to compare the time consistent solution under alternative institutional constraints which society might choose to impose upon itself.
We provide an introduction to optimal fiscal and monetary policy using the primal approach to optimal taxation. We use this approach to address how fiscal and monetary policy should be set over the long run and over the business cycle. We find four substantive lessons for policymaking: Capital income taxes should be high initially and then roughly zero; tax rates on labor and consumption should be roughly constant; state-contingent taxes on assets should be used to provide insurance against adverse shocks; and monetary policy should be conducted so as to keep nominal interest rates close to zero. We begin optimal taxation in a static context. We then develop a general framework to analyze optimal fiscal policy. Finally, we analyze optimal monetary policy in three commonly used models of money: a cash-credit economy, a money-in-the-utility-function economy
This paper evaluates alternative rules by which the Fed may set interest rates using the small model of the U.S. economy estimated in Rotemberg and Woodford (1997). Our main substantive finding is that low and stable inflation together with stable interest rates can be achieved by letting the funds rate respond positively to inflation while also responding, with a coefficient bigger than one, to the lagged funds rate itself. A rule in which the interest rate is set in this extremely simple way does almost as well as a more complicated rule which is optimal in our setting, in the sense of maximizing expected utility to the representative household. Furthermore, when the funds rate responds to inflation only with a delay, due to delay in the availability of inflation data, performance under the rule is only slightly reduced.
This paper aims to study if imperfections in the labor market justify a fiscal policy where public spending, labor income tax rates and debt are set to stabilize output. We present a dynamic general equilibrium model and solve for the optimal policy considering two different labor market setups. First we assume a competitive labor market and then we introduce a union with monopoly power in the labor market. Both models reach the same conclusion as regards the stabilization policy: it is not optimal to use the fiscal policy to stabilize. We also find that government spending should be larger when a competitive labor market is assumed. These main results arise both under complete and incomplete markets for the debt.
Macroeconomics is moving toward a New Neoclassical Synthesis, which like the synthesis of the 1960s melds Classical with Keynesian ideas. This paper describes the key features of the new synthesis and its implications for the role of monetary policy. We find that the New Neoclassical Synthesis rationalizes an activist monetary policy which is a simply system of inflation targets. Under this "neutral" monetary policy, real quantities evolve as suggested in the literature on real business cycles. Going beyond broad principles, we use the new synthesis to address several operational aspects of inflation targeting. These include its practicality, the response to oil shocks, the choice of price index, the design of a mandate, and the tactics of interest rate policy.
This paper develops the Parameterized Expectations Approach (PEA) for solving nonlinear dynamic stochastic models with rational expectations. The method can be applied to a variety of models, including models with strong nonlinearities, sub-optimal equilibria, and many continuous state variables. In this approach, the conditional expectations in the equilibrium conditions are approximated by finite-dimensional classes of functional forms. The approach is highly efficient computationally because it incorporates endogenous oversampling and Monte-Carlo integration, and it does not impost a discrete grid on the state variables or the stochastic shocks. We prove that PEA can approximate the correct solution with arbitrary accuracy on the ergodic set by increasing the size of the Monte-Carlo simulations and the dimensionality of the approximating family of functions.
This paper studies the quantitative properties of fiscal and monetary policy in business cycle models. In terms of fiscal policy, optimal labor tax rates are virtually constant and optimal capital income tax rates are close to zero on average. In terms of monetary policy, the Friedman rule is optimal—nominal interest rates are zero—and optimal monetary policy is activist in the sense that it responds to shocks to the economy.
This paper presents a non-technical discussion of some of the important developments in macroeconomics over the past twenty years. It considers three broad categories of research. First, it discusses how the notion of rational expectations has affected economists' views on the role of economic policy, the debate over rules versus discretion, and empirical work in macroeconomics Second, it discusses various new classical approaches to the business cycle, including imperfect information theories, real business cycle theories, and sectoral shift theories. Third, it discusses various new Keynesian approaches to the business cycle, includes theories based on general disequilibrium, labor contracting, and menu costs.
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 financial crisis. In addition to widely used VaR and ES models, we also study the behavior of conditional and unconditional extreme value (EV) models to generate 99 percent confidence level estimates as well as developing a new loss function that relates tail losses to ES forecasts. Backtesting results show that only our proposed new hybrid and Extreme Value (EV)-based VaR models provide adequate protection in both developed and emerging markets, but that the hybrid approach does this at a significantly lower cost in capital reserves. In ES estimation the hybrid model yields the smallest error statistics surpassing even the EV models, especially in the developed markets.
Many argue that the intrinsic uselessness of fiat money makes ``coordination'' an essential part of monetary theory: consumers could all equally well coordinate on believing that fiat money has no value. The coordination view suggests, however, that many transactions patterns are in fact possible as economic outcomes. Indeed, we do seem to observe different patterns of exchange at different times and in different places, and the relative importance of money is probably not a universal constant. The main goal of this paper is to develop a simple model of money's role as a medium of exchange when multiple transaction patterns are possible. The coordination view is conveniently analyzed in a dynamic version of Shubik's game-theoretic trading post economy. This economy allows a role for fiat money, and fiat money can coexist with barter in exchange. There are multiple decentralized equilibria, and one of these coincides with the equilibrium of a cash-in-advance economy: the model can be viewed as a generalization of the cash-in-advance framework. Other equilibria use both money and other, intrinsically valuable, objects as media of exchange. One implication of the coordination view is that the effects of monetary policy in general depend on the equilibrium transactions pattern. The paper illustrates this point by showing how estimates of the welfare costs of inflation may be biased depending on the econometrician's beliefs about the transactions patterns.
Since the actual solution to intertemporal rational expectations models is usually not known, it is useful to have criteria
for judging the accuracy of a given numerical solution. In this paper we propose a test for accuracy that is easy to implement
and can be applied to a wide class of models without knowledge of the exact solution. We discuss the power of the test by
simulating several models with the linear-quadratic approximation and with the method of parameterized expectations. We conclude
that the test is powerful.
The IS-LM model has no greater prospect of being a viable analytical vehicle for macroeconomics in the 1990s than the Ford Pinto has of being a sporty, reliable car for the 1990s. Because of its treatment of expectations, the IS-LM model, as traditionally constructed and currently used, is a hazardous base on which to build positive theories of business fluctuations and to undertake policy analysis. To simplify economic reality sufficiently to use the IS-LM model as an analytical tool, economists must essentially ignore expectations; we now know that this simplification eliminates key determinants of aggregate demand. The last two decades of research have taught economists that the assumption of rational expectations is a powerful part of economic explanations of individual and market behavior, ranging from consumption and investment dynamics to pricing of stocks and bonds. The emphasis on expectations in the macro-model is the end result of a process of building microeconomic underpinnings that was initiated in the 1950s and 1960s, when the goal was to develop dynamic theoretical foundations for the IS and LM schedules; inevitably, consideration of dynamic choice pushed the question of expectations to the forefront. As a result, most of the equations of the ISLM model are now viewed as summarizing purposeful economic behavior in which choices over time play a central role. However, as we will see, this finding means there is no way to maintain traditional uses of the IS-LM model.
The new Keynesians made more rapid progress in understanding the microeconomics of unemployment than in understanding the microeconomics of nominal price rigidity. But the past five years have seen important breakthroughs in this second area. This paper will describe these breakthroughs, discuss our current understanding of nominal rigidity, and assess the work that remains to be done.
This article describes a method for solving the one-good stochastic growth model by parameterizing the expectations part of the stochastic Euler equation. The conditional expectation is specified as a function of the state of the system, and the parameters of that function are estimated to solve the model. The article includes a discussion of how to find the parameters of the function and determine systematically the complexity of the functional form necessary to solve the model.
Optimal Fiscal and Monetary Pol-icy” Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis
- V V Chari
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Chari, V.V. and P. Kehoe (1998): “Optimal Fiscal and Monetary Pol-icy” Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Research Department Sta¤ Report 251.
Recursive contracts. Mimeo
- A Marcet
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Interest-rate rules in an estimated sticky price model
- J Rottemberg
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