time consistent public policy in this paper we study how a benevolent government that cannot commit to future policy should trade off the costs and benefits of public expenditure we characterize and solve for markov perfect equilibria of the dynamic game between successive governments the characterization consists of an inter temporal first order condition a generalized euler equation for the government and we use it both to gain insight into the nature of the equilibrium and as a basis for computations for a calibrated economy we find that when the only tax base available to the government is capital income an inelastic source of funds at any point in time the government still refrains from taxing at confiscatory rates we also find that when the only tax base is labour income the markov equilibrium features less public expenditure and lower tax rates than the ramsey equilibrium

generalized travel cost model and water quality benefits a reconsideration with federal agencies required to conduct benefit cost analyses for each new major regulation analyses of water quality changes are likely to be an increasingly important part of the policymaking process a revised version of the travel cost demand model and illustrations show the importance of these revisions for the model s estimates although the magnitude of the difference in benefit estimates between the original and new versions of the model varies with the specific recreation site selected the findings indicate that the original model generally implied estimated benefits from three to over 30 times as large as the revised model this implies that judgment can play an important role in the definition and use of economic models as well as the need for better information on households recreation decisions and more complete description of recreation site characteristics 15 references 4 tables

taxing capital not a bad idea after all we quantitatively characterize the optimal capital and labor income tax in an overlapping generations model with idiosyncratic uninsurable income shocks and permanent productivity difierences of households the optimal capital income tax rate is signiflcantly positive at 36 percent the optimal progressive labor income tax is roughly a at tax of 23 percent with a deduction of 7 200 relative to average household income of 42 000 the high optimal capital income tax is mainly driven by the life cycle structure of the model whereas the optimal progressivity of the labor income tax is attributable to the insurance and redistribution role of the tax system jel e62 h21 h24

the big push natural resource booms and growth a simple application of big push reasoning suggests that natural resource booms can be important catalysts for development in poorer countries in this paper we present evidence from seven latin american countries that natural resource booms are sometimes accompa nied by declining per capita gdp we present a model with natural resources increasing returns in the spirit of big push models and expectations to clarify some of the reasons this may happen q 1999 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

measuring values for environmental resources under uncertainty abstract the relationship between conventional hicksian measures of the benefits from changes in environmental amenities under certainty and corresponding measures of valuation when the conditions of access to an uncertain environmental resource are changed is considered the analysis utilizes a contingent commodity framework with the assumption of state dependent preferences the findings suggest that the valuation of these changes will depend upon the availability of fair markets for diversifying risk moreover conventional measures of compensating or equivalent surplus will not necessarily bound the individual s valuation of a change in access to an uncertain environmental resource

trading relations is the roadmap from lome to cotonou correct one of the reasons behind the re negotiation of the lome convention resulting in the cotonou agreement was the alleged inability of the trade provisions of lome to increase the african caribbean and pacific acp countries market share of the european union eu market the cotonou agreement may lead to the more advanced acps being granted future market access to the eu under a generalized system of preferences gsp in conformity with world trade organization wto rules to this end this paper makes a comparative analysis of the effects of the eu s lome convention and gsp on exports of developing countries using a gravity type of model the results indicate positive and statistically significant export effects of the both the lome convention and the gsp the export effects are greater in case of the lome convention throughout the study period running from 1973 to 1992 in addition the paper illustrates the eu country distribution of the export effects and shows that belgium and the netherlands ar

the incidence and allocation effects of a tax on corporate distributions abstract to study the effects of double taxation first at the corporation level then at the shareholder level this paper analyzes a model with a tax on all corporate distributions to equity owners and no other taxes contrary to the common view the tax is shown to have no subtitution effect and in particular no effect on the corporate choice between debt and equity via retained earnings finance the analysis opens to question certain arguments commonly used to support integration of corporation and individual income taxes via dividend relief

the incidence and efficiency costs of corporate taxation when corporate and noncorporate firms produce the same good one difficulty confronting harberger s celebrated model of the corporate income tax is how to treat noncorporate production in primarily corporate sectors and corporate production in primarily noncorporate sectors the paper presents a two good model with corporate and noncorporate production of both goods the incidence of corporate tax in our mutual production model can differ markedly from that in the harberger model the difference between the two models in deadweight loss is also striking with losses in the mutual production model many times larger than those in the harberger model

estimating recreation demand using the properties of the implied consumer surplus consumer surplus estimates are random variables while they are generally recognized as stochastic little attention was given to their properties prior to bockstael and strand s 1987 evaluation of conventional practices for using recreation demand models in benefit measurement their paper as well as all the research it stimulated adopted a similar strategy namely to judge the methods for estimating demand or random utility models based on the properties of their respective consumer surplus estimates this paper proposes a different strategy to define estimators based on the properties of their implied consumer surplus estimates this type of argument is not new and usually is associated with the rationale offered for bayesian estimators 2 however the motivation for the estimator proposed here can be based on minimizing the mean squared error of the consumer surplus estimates moreover it can be constructed from the statistics usually reported with ordinary least squares ols estimates

the effect of taxes on investment and income shifting to puerto rico the income of puerto rican affiliates of u s corporations is essentially untaxed by either puerto rico or the united states this lowers the tax penalty on investment there and also makes it attractive to shift reported taxable income from the u s parent corporation to the puerto rican affiliate this paper investigates these two interrelated impacts of taxation by developing a structural econometric model of the joint decisions regarding investment and income shifting and estimating the model using firm level data on the activity u s corporations in puerto rico the results suggest that the income shifting advantages are the predominant reason for u s investment in puerto rico

the vanishing harberger triangle this paper shows that the double taxation of corporate dividends or profit repatriations implies a nucleus theory of the corporation after the firm is set up with a small stock of original capital it enters a phase of purely internal growth during which no dividends are paid and no shares are issued the phase terminates when an efficient stock of capital has been accumulated and dividends are paid during the growth phases the tax distortion is inversely related to the tax burden and it is larger than conventional formulae for the cost of internal and external equity finance suggest

a theory of political transitions we develop a theory of political transitions inspired by the experiences of western europe and latin america nondemocratic societies are controlled by a rich elite the initially disenfranchised poor can contest power by threatening revolution especially when the opportunity cost is low for example during recessions the threat of revolution may force the elite to democratize democracy may not consolidate because it is redistributive and so gives the elite an incentive to mount a coup highly unequal societies are less likely to consolidate democracy and may end up oscillating between regimes and suffer substantial fiscal volatility

are trade preferences more effective than aid in supporting exports evidence from the everything but arms preference scheme this study examines the effect of the everything but arms eba trade preferences regime on exports from african caribbean and pacific countries acp to the european union eu with this aim an augmented gravity model is estimated for exports from the 79 acp countries to the eu 15 for the time period 1995 to 2005 using panel data techniques the model estimates are used to quantify the effect of the eba preferences on the acp ldcs export performance and to compare it with the impact of official development assistance in addition to their separate effects the combined impact of eba and aid flows is examined the main results do not confirm a positive effect of the eba regime on exports otherwise the combined effect of eba and aid on exports is positive supporting an eu development strategy that includes both sorts of assistance aid and trade preferences

aid policies and growth reply in burnside and dollar 2000 we used standard regression techniques from the growth literature to measure the effect of foreign aid on growth the main finding in our paper was that the effect of foreign aid on growth depended on the macroeconomic policies of recipient countries in this issue william easterly et al 2004 challenge the robustness of our result to new data before commenting on their findings it is useful to review the basis of our original findings our paper focused on three versions of a panel growth regression estimated using data for 51 countries and six four year periods from 1970 to 1993 these regressions may be summarized as

the effects of taxation on the selling of corporate stock and the realization of capital gains this study provides the first econometric analysis of the effect of taxation on the realization of capital gains the analysis thus extends and complements the earlier study by feldstein and yitzhaki 1978 of the effect of taxation on the selling of corporate stock the present analysis using a large new body of data obtained from individual tax returns supports the earlier finding that corporate stock sales are quite sensitive to tax rates and then shows that the effect on the realization of capital gains is even stronger

effect of distance on the preservation value of water quality in the past dozen years an extensive body of literature has developed on the willingness to pay for water quality in particular its recreation use and nonuse preservation values this paper illustrates a procedure for estimating the effect of distance on the preservation value of environmental quality using the contingent valuation approach the case considered is the potential degradation of water quality due to coal mining activity in the flathead river drainage system montana the analysis supports a negative association for this particular study area the effect of distance on preservation value was considered both directly and indirectly through its effect on visits 36 references 2 tables

a simple repackaging model of recreational choices the traditional travel cost model uses trips or visits as its measure of quantity and travel cost per trip or visit as its price however because many estimated demand curves do not hold visit length constant they cannot be used to value increments of use the simple repackaging model of muellbauer and fisher and shell is used to derive demand curves exhibiting constant visit length from demand curves exhibiting variable visit length the former allow the marginal quantity valuations that are necessary for management decisions involving capacity or use the travel cost method for measuring recreation demand was originally developed to assist in determining the value of a given resource used for recreational purposes comparison of the recreation value with values in other uses is important for the planning process resource allocation however often requires estimates of the marginal values of additional quantities of the resource i e additional recreation capacity and or increases in the use of the resource or improvements in resource quality marginal valuations of quality improvements involve shifts in the travel cost demand

optimal taxation in life cycle economies abstract we use a very standard life cycle growth model in which individuals have a labor leisure choice in each period of their lives to prove that an optimizing government will almost always find it optimal to tax or subsidize interest income the intuition for our result is straightforward in a life cycle model the individual s optimal consumption work plan is almost never constant and an optimizing government almost always taxes consumption goods and labor earnings at different rates over an individual s lifetime one way to achieve this goal is to use capital and labor income taxes that vary with age if tax rates cannot be conditioned on age a nonzero tax on capital income is also optimal as it can imperfectly mimic age conditioned consumption and labor income tax rates journal of economic literature classification numbers e62 h21

optimal fiscal policy in a business cycle model 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 there is an equivalence class of ex post capital income tax rates and bond policies that support a given allocation within this class the optimal ex post capital tax rates can range from close to independently and identically distributed to close to a random walk 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

foreign direct investment and economic growth an increasingly endogenous relationship summary this paper investigates whether foreign direct investment fdi affects economic growth based on a panel of data for 84 countries over the period 1970 99 both single equation and simultaneous equation system techniques are applied to examine this relationship a significant endogenous relationship between fdi and economic growth is identified from the mid 1980s onwards fdi not only directly promotes economic growth by itself but also indirectly does so via its interaction terms the interaction of fdi with human capital exerts a strong positive effect on economic growth in developing countries while that of fdi with the technology gap has a significant negative impact

measuring the cost of time in recreation demand analysis reply we appreciate the comments of johnson and ward on our note measuring the value of time we would like to emphasize that the purpose of our note was to offer an empirical approach to measuring value of time which permitted the value to vary across individuals but which inferred this variation from individuals in the sample we realize that empirical approaches to measuring the value of time are currently evolving the comments by johnson and ward help elucidate some basic issues in valuing time we respond first to johnson and then to ward

gravity models a reformulation and an application to discriminatory trade arrangements gravity models are used to estimate trade flows from 162 countries into 11 major importing countries for 1976 counting the ec as one the main theories underlying gravity models are reviewed and a new gravity model is derived from a linear expenditure system a major innovation of this model is that both tariffs and dummy variables for discriminatory arrangements are incorporated price variables are also explicitly included in the model the tariff and the dummy variables are found to be statistically significant and this indicates that previous gravity model studies which used dummies to estimate the trade benefits of preferential tariffs may not have accurately estimated the effects of the preferences the price variables generally are also found to be statistically significant which casts doubt on the homogeneous goods assumption underlying the purchasing power parity hypothesis some significant differences in the estimates were found when separate equations were regressed for the eec and the us

did fdi really cause chinese economic growth a meta analysis summary foreign direct investment fdi has been linked to economic growth in a number of countries productivity spillovers at the firm level have been identified as a key element in the process by which fdi stimulates economic growth moreover there is evidence of fdi related productivity spillovers in china whether these spillovers have been of sufficient size to affect growth at the aggregate level however is an empirical question we apply meta analysis to the corresponding empirical literature to find an answer our main finding is that the effect of fdi on chinese economic growth is much smaller than one would expect from a naive aggregation of existing estimates publication bias and a profusion of estimates based on less preferred study and sample characteristics have served to inflate observed estimates once these effects are accounted for the estimated effect of fdi on chinese economic growth is reduced to statistical insignificance this suggests that the cause s of the chinese economic miracle likely lie elsewhere

redistributive taxation in a simple perfect foresight model abstract we investigate the redistributive potential of capital taxation in an intertemporal maximizing model of capital formation first even unanticipated redistributive capital taxation is severely limited in its effectiveness since it depresses wages second under any convergent redistributive tax policy which maximizes a paretian social objective the capital income tax will converge to zero independent of the factor supply elasticities these results are independent of workers holdings of capital

rethinking trade preferences how africa can diversify its exports this paper argues that the contribution of trade preferences to economic development needs to be reappraised in light of the growth of globalised trade in manufactures trade preferences may be able to act as a catalyst for manufacturing exports leading to rapid growth in exports and employment to do so preferences need to be designed to be consistent with international trade in fragmented tasks as opposed to complete products and need to be open to countries with sufficient levels of complementary inputs such as skills and infrastructure recent experience with the african growth and opportunities act shows that in the right conditions sub saharan african countries have had large manufacturing export supply response to trade preferences

factor supply differences as a source of comparative advantage the core of international microeconomics remains the heckscher ohlin factor proportions model although the page count in recent academic journals is decidedly against the heckscher ohlin model this is more a reflection of how economists spend their research time than what they believe time will tell whether the flurry of formal models with scale economies and strategic interactions will be able to squeeze the heckscher ohlin model to a small part of economists collective consciousness frankly i doubt that this will happen after all the heckscher ohlin model has competed for decades with these other viewpoints and has done so quite successfully the new theories of international trade are novel in a linguistic sense discarding the english only language of an earlier generation in favor of the language of modern mathematical modeling there is no doubt that linguistic innovations are important and are capable of driving the profession one way or the other at least on a temporary basis recall that even the word protection is a metaphor intended to make tariffs seem attractive i wonder how the commercial policy debate would go if tariffs were labeled robbery instead of protection i hope that there is something about the content of the message separate from the language that determines the ultimate course of the intellectual currents of our profession insightfulness validity usefulness and the like ought to matter and may be decisive linguistic novelty is one possible reason for the recent interest in scale economies and industrial strategies as explanations of international trade another possibility is that in the marketplace of ideas demand creates its own supply there is a new thirst for isolationism on the part of a substantial segment of the u s population who in the last several decades have found their earnings under attack from foreign competition it would be unseemly and counterproductive for this group of workers owners to petition the u s government merely to increase their own earnings they demand and they have been supplied some substantial intellectual foundation to justify their complaints about reduced earnings the new trade theory does the job quite nicely thank you a not insubstantial reason why economists should cling to the heckscher ohlin model is that it gives trade barriers the label that they genuinely deserve highway robbery of course this robbery is often more in the style of robin hood than jesse james but nonetheless when the metaphors are peeled away every trade barrier that i have ever seen is a device to transfer income from one group to another or perhaps more frequently to stop the transfer of income that would otherwise take place trade barriers may have side effects but income redistribution is their primary purpose i find myself at roughly the 10 percent point in this paper without mentioning any empirical facts first there was linguistic felicitousness and novelty then there was pandering what about the facts don t they matter sorry they do not matter very much one important reason why the facts do not matter much is that the heckscher ohlin model and every other model in economics is both factually correct and factually incorrect we have not developed an intellectual culture that can deal with the complexity and ambiguity of real economic phenomena we teach ourselves a naive anderson graduate school of management university of california los angeles ca 90024

on the consequences of eliminating capital tax differentials in the united states structure and equipment capital are eectively taxed at dierent rates recently president obama joined the group of policy makers and economists who propose to eliminate these dierentials this paper analyzes the consequences of such a reform using an incomplete markets model with equipment skill complementarity we nd that the reform increases average welfare by 0 1 importantly we nd that the reform does not involve the usual eciency vs equality trade o it improves both jel classication e62 h21

saving growth and investment a macroeconomic analysis using a panel of countries this paper provides a descriptive analysis of the long and short run correlations among saving investment and growth rates for 123 countries over the period 1961 94 three results are robust across data sets and estimation methods i lagges saving rates are positively related to investment rates ii investment rates granger cause growth rates with a negative sign iii growth rates granger cause investment with a positive sign

optimal capital taxation revisited abstract we revisit the question of how capital should be taxed we allow for a rich set of tax instruments that consists of taxes widely used in practice including consumption dividend capital and labor income taxes we restrict policies to those that respect pre existing promises regarding the current value of wealth we show that capital should not be taxed i e there should be no intertemporal distortions if households have preferences that are standard in the macroeconomics literature we show that ramsey outcomes that must respect such promises are time consistent we show that the presumption in the literature that capital should be taxed for some length of time arises because the tax system is restricted

the opportunity cost of travel time as a noisy wage fraction few issues are more important to welfare estimation with recreation demand models than the specification of the opportunity cost of travel time the two most common approaches to specifying this cost treat it as a fixed fraction of the recreationist s wage and either estimate the fraction done infrequently or assume it takes some value done commonly with references to results from the commute time literature used to justify the latter however these approaches lack firm conceptual rationales and the consequences of using them are not fully understood recognizing that information limitations often preclude more general approaches we use a joint recreation travel labor supply model to show that under relatively modest assumptions the opportunity cost of travel time can be expressed as a wage fraction with noise this formulation is straightforward to implement as part of random parameters based recreation demand models we then evaluate the welfare consequences of using the two approaches noted above which are special cases of the noisy wage fraction specification our results suggest that the more critical restriction to relax in opportunity cost of travel time specifications is the absence of noise rather than the specific level of the wage fraction

trade and poverty in the poor countries now widely regarded as economically benign in the sense that it increases the size of the pie the recent anti globalization critics have suggested that it is socially malign on several dimensions among them the question of poverty 2 their contention is that trade accentuates not ameliorates and that it deepens not diminishes poverty in both the rich and the poor countries the theoretical and empirical analysis of the impact of freer trade on poverty in the rich and in the poor countries is not symmetric of course we focus here only on the latter in doing so we distinguish between two different strands of argumentation static and dynamic

bootstrapping in applied welfare analysis bootstrapping procedures are used to estimate the statistical properties of common empirical welfare measures results from a monte carlo experiment indicate that welfare estimates such as marshallian consumer surplus often exhibit significant bias standard errors of welfare estimates are found to often exceed the magnitude of the point estimate for typical cross section data sets and are generally larger than the difference between comparable hicksian and marshallian measures precision of welfare estimates can be markedly enhanced through generating larger data sets obtaining better model fits and through imposition of innocuous inequality restrictions on the demand function parameters

taxation and corporate payout policy this paper presents new evidence on how corporate payout policy responds to the differential between the tax burden on dividend income and that on accruing capital gains it describes the construction of weighted average marginal tax rate series for the period since 1929 and it suggests that the enactment of the job growth of taxpayer relief reconciliation act of 2003 should raise the after tax value of dividends relative to capital gains by more than five percentage points the impact of this change on payout depends on the elasticity of dividend payments with respect to the after tax value of dividend income relative to capital gains time series estimates suggest an elasticity of more than three and imply that the recent tax reform could ultimately increase dividends by almost twenty percent this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

optimal fiscal and monetary policy in an economy without capital abstract 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

limiting environmental program contradictions a demand systems application to fishery management economically efficient natural resource policy requires the comprehensive management of environmental improvements over a system of sites use of multisite demand and benefit models can reduce the number and cost of environmental program contradictions in this paper we present a multisite demand model that incorporates several quality dimensions for a system of new mexico fishing sites use of the model permits managers to improve total welfare at lower cost by simultaneously distributing opportunity across all elements in resource users choice sets model results show that errors that result from independently adding values of interdependent program elements approach 50

international coordination of fiscal policy in limiting economies we examine the limiting behavior of cooperative and noncooperative fiscal policies as countries market power goes to zero we show that these policies converge if countries raise revenues through lump sum taxation however if there are unremovable domestic distortions such as distorting taxes there can be gains to coordination even when a single country s policy cannot affect world prices these results differ from the received wisdom in the optimal tariff literature the key distinction is that contrary to the tariff literature the spending decisions of governments are explicitly modeled

nonlinear capital taxation without commitment we study efficient nonlinear taxation of labor and capital in a dynamic mirrleesian model incorporating political economy constraints policies are chosen sequentially over time without commitment our main result is that the marginal tax on capital income is progressive in the sense that richer agents face higher marginal tax rates

individual travel cost method estimation and benefit assessment with a discrete and possibly grouped dependent variable the trip visit variable in the individual travel cost method is often regarded as discrete furthermore it is often reported in surveys as a grouped variable the number of visits reported falling into one of several classes this paper develops a travel cost model which takes account of discreteness and grouping in both demand and benefit estimation a case study and associated simulations are then reported which indicate the potential extent of bias that may arise from ignoring discreteness grouping in demand and benefit estimation the information loss involved in varying the size of visit classes is also examined

the dynamic effects of tax law asymmetries under the laws of most countries a distinction is made between gains and losses by businesses losses that must be carried forward are subjept to two penalties a loss of interest and expiration previous examinations have focused on the higher expected tax payments such a tax system without full loss offset imposes on risky projects this paper presents a dynamic analysis of the impact of taxation on investment when gains and losses are treated asymmetrically the results demonstrate how firm characteristics and the timing of taxes can influence behaviour under current u s tax law a distinction is made between gains and losses by businesses for corporations gains are taxed at what is essentially a flat rate of 46 while losses do not necessarily qualify for a refund at the same rate to obtain an immediate refund the taxpayer must have had taxable income during the three previous years in excess of the current loss any losses that cannot be carried back in this fashion must be carried forward subject to two implicit penalties such loss carryforwards earn no interest and they expire after fifteen years similar provisions apply in other countries hence businesses investing in risky projects for which the probability of having to carry losses forward is positive can expect to pay higher taxes than they would under a system with full loss offset i e the immediate refund of taxes for losses incurred many corporations

on the optimal taxation of capital income abstract we show that in models in which labor services are supplied jointly with human capital the chamley and judd result on zero capital income taxation in the limit extends to labor taxes as long as accumulation technologies are constant returns to scale moreover for a class of widely used preferences consumption taxes are zero in the limit as well however we show by the construction of two examples that these results no longer hold for certains types of restrictions on tax rates or if there are profits generated journal of economic literatureclassification numbers e62 h21

the aid effectiveness literature the sad results of 40 years of research abstract the aid effectiveness literature ael consists of empirical macroeconomic estimates of the effects of development aid by the end of 2004 it comprised 97 econometric studies of three families of related effects each family has been analyzed in a separate meta analysis the ael is an ideal subject for meta analysis as it uses only a few formally similar models to estimate the same underlying effects it is also an area with strong beliefs often generated by altruism when this whole literature is examined a clear pattern emerges after 40 years of development aid the preponderance of the evidence indicates that aid has not been effective we show that the distribution of results is significantly asymmetric reflecting the reluctance of the research community to publish negative results the dutch disease effect on exchange rates provides a plausible explanation for the observed aid ineffectiveness

the reliability of estimates of environmental benefits from recreation demand models recreation demand models are commonly employed tools of economists interested in valuing improvements in environmental amenities despite their importance little comparative work has been undertaken to examine the ability of the models to accurately estimate welfare changes a simulation study designed to compare the reliability of estimated welfare measures compensating variation and consumer surplus from several commonly employed recreation demand models is presented results of the study indicate that choice of functional form and model specification are important determinants of the resulting estimates of benefits

welfare aspects of current u s corporate taxation the corporate income tax has provided a steadily declining fraction of federal revenues during the postwar era accounting for 23 0 percent during fiscal year 1966 and 14 2 13 9 and 10 2 percent in 1971 1976 and 1981 respectively however for several reasons aggregate tax collections are of limited use in measuring the distortionary impact of the corporate tax first one must allow for cyclical and potentially long run changes in the rate of profit to measure changes in average tax rates more fundamental problems lie in attempts to relate such an average tax rate to the desired measure the marginal tax rate assets of different age cohorts historically have faced different tax schedules because of a succession of nonretroactive tax law changes average tax rates on current income represent an amalgam of such tax rules furthermore even with a constant tax schedule the taxable income which serves as the base of the corporate tax diverges systematically from economic income because of the investment tax credit and the acceleration of depreciation allowances relative to actual economic depreciation an asset typically receives deductions and credits that are more than sufficient to shelter all income associated with it in the years immediately after purchase but faces a tax base exceeding economic income in more distant years after all depreciation allowances have been used up this implies that taxes will vary as a fraction of income depending on the age structure of assets fast growing firms will face low and potentially negative average tax rates on current income though facing the same tax schedule as stagnant firms with positive current tax payments this ignores the further complications that arise from the asymmetric treatment accorded gains and losses which i discuss below finally there may be serious distortions in the allocation of capital within the corporate sector that aggregate tax rates average or marginal cannot measure these difficulties have led to the general use and acceptance of the effective tax rate to measure the distortionary effects of the tax system this rate is based on a comparison of beforeand after tax internal rates of return on investment projects letting rg and rn be these two measures we define the effective tax rate to be

trade benefits under the eec generalized system of preferences the purpose of the paper is to test for the existence of a statistically significant effect of the eec generalized system of preferences on actual trade flows between developing countries and the eec using a gravity type model we estimate the gross trade creation effect of the eec generalized system of preferences on the eec imports from 10 major developing countries estimation on a yearly basis for the period 1967 1978 indicates the presence of a statistically significant effect it would appear that gross trade creation amounted to about s2 billion for these 10 countries in 1978 in addition to these calculations the paper reviews the eec generalized system of preferences in detail and offers comments on its future impact on exports from developing countries

effective aid how democracy allows development aid to improve the quality of life abstract research into foreign aid has mostly focused on its ability to affect economic i e gdp per capita growth conclusions have been mixed i consider aid s effectiveness differently by its ability to improve quality of life i find that though aid does not affect quality of life in the aggregate it is effective when combined with democracy and ineffective and possibly harmful in autocracies the results suggest that aid would be more effective if it were combined with efforts to encourage democratization

comparing welfare estimates of environmental quality changes from recreation demand models abstract this paper presents a procedure for examining the reliability of welfare estimates resulting from the estimation of multiple site recreation demand models a simulation approach is suggested where a utility function is combined with observations on individual and site characteristics to generate simulated data sets welfare measures associated with an improvement in site quality are calculated recreation demand models are estimated using the simulated data sets estimated welfare measures resulting from the recreation demand models are then compared to the true welfare measures calculated from the simulated data the procedure is demonstrated using two commonly employed recreation demand models

the laffer curve revisited abstract laffer curves for the us the eu 14 and individual european countries are compared using a neoclassical growth model featuring constant frisch elasticity cfe preferences new tax rate data is provided the us can maximally increase tax revenues by 30 with labor taxes and 6 with capital taxes we obtain 8 and 1 for the eu 14 there 54 of a labor tax cut and 79 of a capital tax cut are self financing the consumption tax laffer curve does not peak endogenous growth and human capital accumulation affect the results quantitatively household heterogeneity may not be important while transition matters greatly

does foreign direct investment promote growth exploring the role of financial markets on linkages abstract do multinational companies generate positive externalities for the host country the evidence so far is mixed varying from beneficial to detrimental effects of foreign direct investment fdi on growth with many studies that find no effect in order to provide an explanation for this empirical ambiguity we formalize a mechanism that emphasizes the role of local financial markets in enabling fdi to promote growth through backward linkages using realistic parameter values we quantify the response of growth to fdi and show that an increase in the share of fdi leads to higher additional growth in financially developed economies relative to financially under developed ones

on the simultaneity problem in the aid and growth debate this paper shows that foreign aid has a significant positive average effect on real per capita gross domestic product gdp growth if and only if the quantitatively large negative reverse causal effect of per capita gdp growth on foreign aid is adjusted for in the growth regression instrumental variables estimates show that a 1 percentage point increase in gdp per capita growth decreased foreign aid by over 4 adjusting for this quantitatively large negative reverse causal effect of economic growth on foreign aid shows that a 1 increase in foreign aid increased real per capita gdp growth by around 0 1 percentage points

trade openness and income a re examination abstract this study uses a new innovative measure of trade protection and finds that less trade protection is associated with higher income per capita using data from 131 developed and developing countries

intangible investment and ramsey capital taxation the standard analysis of optimal fiscal policy aggregates different types of assets into a unique capital good and all types of capital taxes into a unique capital tax this paper considers a disaggregated framework an economy with corporate and dividend taxes where firms invest in both tangible and intangible assets which can be expensed or sweat in our setup firms can always respond to changes in the timing of taxation we find that the optimal long run policy features zero corporate taxes and positive dividend taxes with labor and dividend taxes being identical moreover the initial capital levy is relatively small

dividend taxes and firm valuation new evidence dividend taxes and firm valuation new evidence by alan j auerbach and kevin a hassett the jobs and growth tax relief act of 2003 jgtra03 reduced the tax rates on dividends with the highest statutory tax rate of 35 percent falling to 15 percent an interesting twist on the dividend tax cut was its temporary nature the provision as passed was effective only through 2008 and as recent congressional deliberations have illustrated the extension its supporters envisioned was by no means certain this large dividend tax reduction along with its sunset provision offers an unusual natural research experiment on the effects of dividend taxation the theory of dividend taxation suggests three possible scenarios for the effects of the dividend tax reduction under the tax irrelevance view the marginal shareholder is a tax free entity or a taxable investor who ignores or can offset incremental taxes and the dividend tax reduction has no effect on equity values or firm behavior under the traditional view the marginal source of equity finance is new share issuance and the tax reduction feeds through to the firm s user cost and stimulates extra capital formation share values rise in the short run but after full adjustment the higher capital level reduces the marginal revenue product of capital enough to offset the dividend tax reduction leaving equity prices the same under the new view the marginal source of finance is retained earnings and the dividend tax cut is capitalized into the share price of the firm but has no investment effect understanding the economic consequences of the dividend tax reduction requires knowledge of the empirical relevance of these competing views our previous paper auerbach and hassett 2005 performed an event study analysis of a large panel of firms to determine how firm attributes affected the valuation response over eight key event dates leading up to the 2003 legislation our results taken together rejected outright

laffer strikes again dynamic scoring of capital taxes abstract we set up a neoclassical growth model extended by a corporate sector an investment and finance decision of firms and a set of taxes on capital income we provide analytical dynamic scoring of taxes on corporate income dividends capital gains other private capital income and depreciation allowances and identify the intricate ways through which capital taxation affects tax revenue in general equilibrium we then calibrate the model for the us and explore quantitatively the revenue effects from capital taxation we take adjustment dynamics after a tax change explicitly into account and compare with steady state effects we find among other results a self financing degree of corporate tax cuts of about 70 90 and a very flat laffer curve for all capital taxes as well as for tax depreciation allowances results are strongest for the tax on capital gains the model predicts for the us that total tax revenue increases by about 0 3 1 2 after abolishment of the tax

valuing a fishing day an application of a systematic varying parameter model deciding how to allocate forage among animals is a fundamentally important process in range management the wisdom of these decisions can be enhanced by estimating the marginal value of forage needed by competing species we present a method for

growth by destination the role of trade in africa s recent growth episode summary over the period 1990 2009 africa has experienced a distinct and favorable reversal in its growth fortunes in stark contrast to its performance in the preceding decades leading to a variety of hypotheses seeking to explain the phenomenon this paper presents both cross country and panel data evidence on the causal factors driving the recent turnaround in africa s growth and takes the unique approach of disaggregating the separate growth impacts of africa s bilateral trade with china europe and america the empirical analysis presented in this paper suggests that the primary and most robust causal factors driving africa s recent growth turnaround are private sector and foreign direct investment although empirical evidence of the role of bilateral trade openness in africa s recent growth emerges within a fixed effect estimation setting these results are not as robust when endogeneity and other issues are fully accounted for among the three major bilateral partners africa s bilateral trade with china has been a relatively important factor spurring growth on the continent and especially so in resource rich oil producing and non landlocked countries the econometric results are not as supportive of growth inducing effects of foreign aid these findings emerge after applying a variety of panel data specifications to the data including the recent fixed effects filtered fef estimator introduced by pesaran and zhou 2014 and the dynamic panel generalized method of moments gmm estimator which allows for endogeneity between trade and growth

the anarchy of numbers aid development and cross country empirics the recent literature contains many stories of how foreign aid affects economic growth aid raises growth in countries with good policies or with difficult economic environments or outside the tropics or on average but with diminishing returns the diversity of the results suggests that many are fragile seven important aid growth papers are tested for robustness using 14 minimally arbitrary tests deriving mainly from differences among the studies themselves this approach investigates the importance of potentially arbitrary specification choices while minimizing the arbitrariness in testing choices all of the results appear fragile especially to sample expansion

aid policies and growth comment in an extraordinarily influential paper craig burnside and david dollar 2000 p 847 find that aid has a positive impact on growth in developing countries with good fiscal monetary and trade policies but has little effect in the presence of poor policies this finding has enormous policy implications the burnside and dollar 2000 henceforth bd result provides a role and strategy for foreign aid if aid stimulates growth only in countries with good policies this suggests that 1 aid can promote economic growth and 2 it is crucial that foreign aid be distributed selectively to countries that have adopted sound policies international aid agencies public policy makers and the press quickly recognized the importance of the bd findings this paper reassesses the links between aid policy and growth using more data the bd data end in 1993 we reconstruct the bd database from original sources and thus 1 add additional countries and observations to the bd data set because new information has become available since they conducted their analyses and 2 extend the data through 1997 thus using the bd methodology we reexamine whether aid influences growth in the presence of good policies given our focus on retesting bd we do not summarize the vast pre bd literature on aid and growth we just note that there was a long and inconclusive literature that was hampered by limited data availability debates about the mechanisms through which aid would affect growth and disagreements over econometric specification see gustav f papanek 1972 robert cassen 1986 paul mosley et al 1987 peter boone 1994 1996 and henrik hansen and finn tarp s 2000 review since bd found that aid boosts growth in good policy environments there have been a number of other papers reacting to their results including paul collier and jan dehn 2001 carljohan dalgaard and hansen 2001 patrick guillaumont and lisa chauvet 2001 hansen and tarp 2001 robert lensink and howard white 2001 and collier and dollar 2002 these papers conduct useful variations and extensions some of which had already figured in the pre bd literature such as introducing additional control variables using nonlinear specifications etc some of these papers confirm the message that aid only works in a good policy environment while others drive out the aid policy interaction term with other variables this literature has the usual limitations of choosing a specification without clear guidance from theory which often means there are more plausible specifications than there are data points in the sample we differentiate our paper from these others by not deviating from the bd specification thus we do not test the robustness of the results to an unlimited number of variations but instead maintain the bd methodology this paper conducts a very simple robustness check by adding new data that were unavailable to bd thus we expand the sample used over their time period and extend the data from 1993 to 1997 easterly department of economics new york university 269 mercer street new york ny 10003 center for global development and national bureau of economic research e mail william easterly nyu edu levine department of finance carlson school of management university of minnesota 321 19th avenue south minneapolis mn 55455 and national bureau of economic research e mail rlevine csom umn edu roodman center for global development 1776 massachusetts avenue nw washington dc 20036 e mail droodman cgdev org we are grateful to craig burnside for supplying data and assisting in the reconstruction of previous results without holding him responsible in any way for the work in this paper thanks also to francis ng and prarthna dayal for generous assistance with updating the sachs warner openness variable and to three anonymous referees craig burnside and henrik hansen for helpful comments 1 see for instance the world bank 1994 2001 2002 the u k department for international development 2000 president george w bush s speech march 16 2002 the announcement by the white house on creating the millennium challenge corporation white house 2002 as well as a washington post editorial february 9 2002 a financial times column by alan beattie march 11 2002 and the economist march 16 2002

a note on incomplete factor taxation abstract optimal capital taxes may be positive in the steady state in ramsey models with an incomplete set of factor taxes i show this possibility crucially depends on how fiscal policy is constrained at date t 0 if the government is barred from manipulating the value of initial assets the chamley judd result reappears the optimal capital tax is always zero in the steady state

mass tourism and the demand for protected natural areas a travel cost approach abstract this paper presents the argument that when environmental protection projects favor tourist activities the travel cost method can be used to measure the value tourists give to the recreational services these areas provide with this idea we describe a model of tourist behavior that allows us to predict whether a tourist will participate in the reactional activities the frequency of participation according to the areas attributes and the costs of producing alternatives to illustrate the model s application we consider tourist demand for and benefits from a set of protected natural areas in mallorca

the effect of common sources of regression error on benefit estimates discussions of the sources of error in recreation demand analysis are common in the existing literature the most traditional line of thought e g gum and martin considers the error component in predicting the individual s recreation behavior to arise from unmeasured socioeconomic factors others e g hanemann attribute at least some of this error to fundamental randomness in human behavior applied statisticians e g hiett and worrall on the other hand suggest that recall of annual number of recreational trips i e the quantity demanded is subject to substantial error still others e g brown et al have argued that recall of explanatory variables such as travel expenses contains error despite the discussion of potential error sources there is no work which relates the sources of error in the demand relationship with benefit measurement 1 of practical importance in recreational demand estimation is whether error assumptions have an influence on welfare measures since it is for public policy decision purposes that recreational demand estimation is usually undertaken will the estimated consumer surplus derived from demand analysis be independent of the assumed source of the error in the regression the purpose of this paper is to explore how the assumptions about sources of error influence estimates of recreation benefits a discussion of the various sources of error in de

a comparison of user benefits and costs of nature conservation at three nature reserves willis k g and benson j f 1988 a comparison of user benefits and costs of nature conservation at three nature reserves reg studies 22 417 228 benefits from conserving wildlife at three sites of special scientific interest are estimated using a travel cost method recording demand in terms of actual site visits these benefits are compared to the costs of nature conservation both the financial cost which is or could be incurred under the wildlife and countryside act 1981 and also the social costs of the agricultural output forgone after protective tariffs and subsidies of the common agricultural policy have been removed willis k g et benson j f 1988 une comparaison des avantages et des couts de la defense de l environnement aux usagers a trois reserves naturelles reg studies 22 417 228 on estime les avantages de la protection de la faune a trois sites d inter t scientifique special a partir d une methode qui calcule les frais de trajet enregistrant la demande en fonction des visi

preference utilisation and tariff reduction in eu imports from acp countries textabstractdespite the long relationship between the eu and the african caribbean and pacific acp countries aimed at encouraging their exports while stimulating growth and investment the acp states still face difficulties in integrating into the world economy this paper examines the non least developed acp countries preferential trade with the eu the objective is to explain the determinants of preferential exports of acp countries towards the eu and to assess the impact of preferences on trade volumes we also investigate the existence of a threshold in the offered duty reduction under which traders have no incentives to ask for preferences

sequential equilibria in a ramsey tax model this paper presents a full characterization of the equilibrium value set of a ramsey tax model more generally it develops a dynamic programming method for a class of policy games between the government and a continuum of households by selectively incorporating euler conditions into a strategic dynamic programming framework we wed two technologies that are usually considered competing alternatives resulting in a substantial simplification of the problem

estimating the benefits of low flow alleviation in rivers the case of the ticino river in switzerland 60 of electricity is produced by hydropower plants the construction and operation of these plants determine some negative environmental externalities such as diminishing groundwater levels and spring flows and a reduction in river flow which can severely curtail recreational and fishing activities this study concentrates on an ex ante appraisal of the monetary benefits resulting from an enhancement of river flow for recreational fishing purposes a comparison of estimates of these benefits to the corresponding costs in terms of loss of electricity production incurred by hydropower plants to alleviate low flows may be useful for policy makers for this analysis as suggested by layman et al land economics 72 pp 113 128 1996 the travel cost method tcm is extended to estimate the economic value of recreational fishing in the ticino river the most important river of the canton ticino under existing and hypothetical river flow conditions anglers were asked to state how the nu

intertemporal distortions in the second best we consider a very general class of public nance problems that encompasses ramsey models of optimal taxation as well as economies with limited commitment private information and political economy frictions we identify a su cient condition to rule out permanent intertemporal distortions at the optimum if there exists an admissible allocation that converges to the rst best steady state then all intertemporal distortions are temporary in the second best we analyze a series of applications to illustrate the signi cance of this result

aid dutch disease and manufacturing growth abstract we examine the effects of aid on the growth of manufacturing using a methodology that exploits the variation within countries and across manufacturing sectors and corrects for possible reverse causality we find that aid inflows have systematic adverse effects on a country s competitiveness as reflected in the lower relative growth rate of exportable industries we provide some evidence suggesting that the channel for these effects is the real exchange rate appreciation caused by aid inflows we conjecture that this may explain in part why it is hard to find robust evidence that foreign aid helps countries grow

optimal taxation of capital income in general equilibrium with infinite lives this paper analyzes the optimal tax on capital income in general equilibrium models of the second best agents have infinite lives and utility functions which are extensions from the koopmans form the population is heterogeneous the important property of the models is the equality between the social and the private discount rates in the long run i find that the optimal tax rate is zero in the long run for a special case of additively separable utility functions i then determine the tax rates along the dynamic path and conditions that are sufficient for the local stability of the steady state

aid and growth what does the cross country evidence really show abstract we examine the effects of aid on growth in cross sectional and panel data after correcting for the possible bias that poorer or stronger growth may draw aid contributions to recipient co

dividend and capital gains taxation under incomplete markets motivated by the jobs and growth tax relief reconciliation act jgtrra of 2003 the effects of capital income tax cuts are investigated in an economy with heterogeneous households and a representative mature firm dividend tax cuts contrary to capital gains tax cuts lead to a decrease in investment and capital this is because they increase the market value of existing capital and households require a higher return to hold this additional wealth in line with empirical evidence the model predicts substantial increases in dividends and stock prices overall the tax cuts lead to a welfare reduction equivalent to a consumption drop of 0 5

endogenous capital utilization investor s effort and optimal fiscal policy abstract the present paper studies the implications of endogenous capital utilization and investor s effort on the structure and time consistency of optimal fiscal policy the main results are that levies of old capital are distortionary and should therefore not be used at confiscatory rates that in a steady state capital and labor income should be taxed at the same rate and investment should be subsidized at the same rate as the tax rate and that the optimal tax policy can be made time consistent through debt restructuring

aid and growth regressions this paper examines the relationship between foreign aid and growth in real gdp per capita as it emerges from simple augmentations of popular cross country growth specifications it is shown that aid in all likelihood increases the growth rate and this result is not conditional on good policy there are however decreasing returns to aid and the estimated effectiveness of aid is highly sensitive to the choice of estimator and the set of control variables when investment and human capital are controlled for no positive effect of aid is found yet aid continues to impact on growth via investment we conclude by stressing the need for more theoretical work before this kind of cross country regressions are used for policy purposes

on the time consistency of optimal capital taxes abstract this paper studies the time inconsistency problem of optimal capital taxes in the absence of full commitment it is well known that debt restructuring cannot solve the time inconsistency problem for economies with a private stock of capital we re examine this result by exploring the role of institutional delays in government policies we show that when the implementation of government policy requires time debt restructuring can enforce commitment to the optimal capital taxes we conclude that since institutional delays characterize democratic decision making the time inconsistency problem of capital taxes is not so severe

hedonic price analysis and selectivity bias hedonic valuation of quality attributes can be misleading when theassumption that these attributes are exogenous to sample selection isviolated this paper considers the simultaneity between hedonic valuationand sample selection in the context of a model of producer behavior andinvestigates empirically the case where land is demanded for use as an inputeither in agricultural production or in touristic development the empiricalanalysis suggests that failing to correct for sample selection results in abiased valuation of the effect of water salinity on agricultural land