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Marginal tax rates and income inequality: a quantitative-theoretic analysis
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An Auerbach-Kotlikoff (AK) overlapping-generations model is used to examine how changes in marginal income-tax rate structures affect the distribution of income, drawing on actual changes to the U.S. tax code. This approach builds on AK by allowing for many different cohort types, and hence for a nontrivial endogenous distribution of income.
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In conducting empirical investigations of the permanent income model of consumption and the consumption-based intertemporal asset pricing model, various authors have imposed restrictions on the nature of the substitutability of consumption across goods and over time. In this paper we suggest a method for testing some of these restrictions and present empirical results using this approach. Our empirical analyses focuses on three questions: (i) Can the services from durable and nondurable goods be treated as perfect substitutes? (ii) Are preferences completely separable between durable and nondurable goods? (iii) What is the nature of intertemporal substitutability of nondurable consumption? When consumers' preferences are assumed to be quadratic, there is very little evidence against the hypothesis that the services from durable goods and nondurable goods are perfect substitutes. These results call into question the practice of testing quadratic models of aggregate consumption using data on nondurables and services only. When we consider S branch specifications, we find more evidence against perfect substitutability between service flows, but less evidence against strict separability across durable and nondurable consumption goods. Among other things, these findings suggest that the empirical shortcomings of the intertemporal asset pricing model cannot be attributed to the neglect of durable goods.
This book assembles nine papers on tax progressivity and its relationship to income inequality, written by leading public finance economists. The papers document the changes during the 1980s in progressivity at the federal, state, and local level in the US. One chapter investigates the extent to which the declining progressivity contributed to the well-documented increase in income inequality over the past two decades, while others investigate the economic impact and cost of progressive tax systems. Special attention is given to the behavioral response to taxation of high-income individuals, portfolio behavior, and the taxation of capital gains. The concluding set of essays addresses the contentious issue of what constitutes a 'fair' tax system, contrasting public attitudes towards alternative tax systems to economists' notions of fairness. Each essay is followed by remarks of a commentator plus a summary of the discussion among contributors.
Spurred by the work of Mehra and Prescott (M-P), economists have been attempting to explain the surprisingly low levels of real interest rates in light of the behavior of aggregate consumption. This paper constructs a continuous 'risk-free' interest rate series for the United States and the United Kingdom from the beginning of the nineteenth century, extending the period analyzed by M-P, 1889-1978, both backward and forward. It is found that the real rate of return on both long- and short-term bonds was over 400 basis points lower during the M-P period than outside that period and that this result holds for the U.K. as well as the U.S. In contrast, equities show almost identical real returns over the whole sample so that the equity premium is only about one-third as large outside the M-P period as within the period. These new data help reconcile the behavior of consumption and the real rate and suggest that the data from 1889-1978 may not be characteristic of returns on fixed income investments in the future.
No intuitive metric exists for assessing the empirical importance of changes over time in income inequality. This paper suggests a method for quantifying the importance of such changes. This method involves a hypothetical redistribution of a constant amount of income, from every income unit below the median level of income to every income unit above the median, so as to make measured inequality in the year to which the redistribution is applied equal to inequality in some other year. For the Gini coefficient, a simple expression for the size of this redistribution exists.
This paper measures the response of taxpayers to the U.S. personal rate reductions from 1982 to 1984. A baseline income distribution is created to describe what level and distribution could be expected in the absence of tax changes. Comparison of this baseline with actual tax return data shows that at least one-sixth, and probably one-quarter, of the revenue ascribable to the rate reductions was recouped by changes in taxpayer behavior. The data also show that federal income tax revenue would have been maximized at a tax rate of about 35 percent, and total income tax revenue maximized at a total tax rate of about 40 percent.
Wages and their effect on labour supply are not only an important subject for labour economists who aim at measuring substitution and income effects. Additionally, the government is interested in the impact of policy changes on the labour market and companies would like to know if it is possible to increase labour supply and especially productivity by increasing the wage rate. This paper introduces a dynamic version of the traditional model of labour supply and presents model extensions and the underlying behavioural assumptions arising from empirical findings, psychology and neuroscience. It evaluates findings and behavioural assumptions derived so far. None of the contributions investigated in this work is entirely free from criticism. The problem of analysing a comprehensive model of labour supply on the one hand, is the scarcity of suitable subjects to investigate and on the other hand, the individuality of each subject observed. With this work a critical analysis of existing research on labour supply decisions is provided. This shall contribute to motivate and ease future research in this area which has to take these problems into account.
This paper uses a Treasury Department panel of more than 4,000 taxpayers to estimate the sensitivity of taxable income to changes in tax rates based on a comparison of the tax returns of the same individual taxpayers before and after the 1986 tax reform. The analysis emphasizes that the response of taxable income involves much more than a change in the traditional measures of labor supply. The evidence shows an elasticity of taxable income with respect to the marginal net-of-tax rate that is at least one and that could be substantially higher. The implications for recent tax rate changes are discussed. Copyright 1995 by University of Chicago Press.
Recent academic research on tax incidence has shifted from an emphasis on static and annual perspectives to examinations of dynamic and lifetime issues. Meanwhile, policy economists are forced to rely on annual data and hence annual analyses. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the nature and analysis of lifetime tax incidence, and to compare and contrast this lifetime perspective with the more familiar annual perspective. In our comparison, we find that (1) the lifetime perspective requires much more data over longer periods of time, because results depends critically on the whole shape of the lifetime earnings profile, (2) individuals classified by annual income decile are often reclassified into very different lifetime income deciles, (3) the personal income tax and corporate income tax appear less progressive on a lifetime basis, while consumption taxes appear less regressive on a lifetime basis, and (4) despite the different approaches and the different reasons underlying the incidence of each particular tax, the lifetime incidence of the entire U.S. tax system is strikingly similar to the annual incidence.