Public Sector Flashcards
What is a pure public good?
- Non-rivalry in consumption
- Non-excludable
What are three reasons a correlation may be spurious?
Reverse Causality
Chance
Omitted Variable
What is a regression discontinuity design?
Compare statistical units close to a cut-off, as they should be very similar in terms of background characteristics.
Why can providing public goods through the market be inefficient?
Because there are externalities, the free rider problem.
What does the space between indifference curves represent?
The Pareto optimal allocations, if both increase spending they would be better off.
When do difference curves show efficient provision?
When they are tangent to each other.
Is efficient provision always public provision?
No
What are the challenges of public provision?
Crowd-out
Measurement
Preferences, requires perfect knowledge
What are the pros and cons of contracting out?
Good for prices bad for quality
What are the benefits of public education?
-Productivity (positive spillovers in productivity and tax revenues)
- Citizenship (democratic process, reduce crime, settling into society)
- Credit Market Failures (involvement is expensive without gov.)
- Failure to maximise family utility (parents may value their current consumption more than their kid’s future )
- Redistribution (education open to everyone)
How are positive externalities usually internalised?
-Price Mechanism (discount private education)
- Quantity Mechanism(mandate certain level of education)
What is a solution to crowding out?
-Educational vouchers:
Increases income while forcing family to spend on education. Does not create incentives to spend less on education.
What are the main disadvantages of vouchers?
- Excessive school specialisation
- Increase in school segregation
- Inefficient use of government resources
- Non competitive education market
What are the possible explanation for the relationship between wage and education? What does this imply for policy making?
- Education increases human capital
- Education acts as a screening device
If it increases human capital government will want to invest in education, if it acts as screening device then it will not (returns are purely private) .
What did Duflo (2000) do investigating IPRES program in Indonesia? What findings?
-Duflo’s study in Indonesia examines school construction effects:
- More schools lead to increase in education and wages.
- Used variations in the program’s intensity across regions (DiD)
-Identification Assumption: there is no time-varying or region specific effects that correlate with the program also used a bunch of controls.
What are the 5 classifications of taxes?
Payroll taxes(direct)
Individual income taxes (direct)
Corporate income taxes(direct)
Wealth taxes (direct/indirect)
Consumption taxes (indirect)
What is vertical equity?
Those with more resources should pay higher taxes. This means that taxes must be progressive.
What is horizontal equity?
Those with the same resources should pay the same taxes
What are the two ways to levy a commodity tax?
Ad valorem (per value) , Excise tax (per unit)
What is the difference between a tax deduction and a tax credit? Which is better for vertical equity?
Tax deduction reduces taxable income, tax credit reduces the amount of tax.
- Tax credits
What are commodity taxes? What are their advantages/disadvantages?
Taxes levied on transactions. Many transactions are public information. BUT, they distort consumer choice.
What are the three rules of tax incidence?
- Statutory burden is not the same as economic burden
- The market side on which the tax is levied is irrelevant for distribution of tax burden
- The more inelastic party bears a larger share of the burden
What did the Chetty et al. experiment did investigating tax salience in 2009 do?
Modified price tags in US stores to show the price with tax:
- Used a triple difference in differences approach to see if the behaviour of shoppers changed.
- Found that the way in which taxes were displayed changed how much the behaviour of consumers was affected. More salient taxes have a bigger impact, consumers under react to taxes that are not salient.
- Used Cosmetics products VS other products in same aisle
- One large store in NC vs other similar stores
- 3 weeks Feb to March VS 2005 and 6 weeks of 2006
What is the formula for DWL of taxation? What is DWL proportional to?
DWL = 0.5elasticity (X/p)*t**2
- To elasticity, the more elastic the more DWL.
When is a commodity tax optimal?
When the tax rate across goods is chosen to minimise DWL
What is the Ramsey Rule?
MDWL/MR = lambda
What is the inverse elasticity rule?
t = (1/elasticity)*lambda
What is the implication of the Ramsey rule?
The gov should set up taxes across commodities such that the ratio of MDWL to MR is equal across commodities.
What is the implication of the inverse elasticity rule?
Set taxes proportional to the inverse elasticity of demand for that good. Therefore tax inelastic goods more and elastic goods less.
How do you determine the optimal income tax rate?
Similar to Ramsey rule, equalise the marginal utility per unit of revenue raised: Mu/Mr = lambda
What did the Eissa(1995) study investigating taxation and women labour supply find?
Used a difference in differences approach to see the effect of the Tax Reform Act of 1986 in the USA:
- Compared above 99th percentile married women earners and 75th percentile women earners. She found that women with higher earnings increase their labor supply after the tax increase.
-Half of the effect comes from the extensive margin.
- She focused on second earners because they respond stronger to changes in earning opportunities
What is the EITC?
Earned income tax credit. The largest anti poverty program in the US, it provides tax refunds to low income households with children.
What does Chetty et al. 2013 do with the EITC?
Wants to investigate the effect of taxes on Labour Supply:
- Uses a proxy of EITC knowledge per zip code by measuring the fractions of individuals who report income to maximise EITC refunds.
- Exploits differences in EITC eligibility after the birth of a child.
- High knowledge areas show a big response to this, change their wage earnings.
- Strong Bunching
What is the most likely reason second earners respond strongly to changes in after-tax wages?
Because they likely trade it off with childcare costs.
How does home childcare not being taxed create a tax wedge?
Imagine you earn 4000 p.m. with 50% tax. Childcare is 2400 a month so you decided to stay at home. This results in a loss of productivity of 1600.
What are some possible solutions to the tax wedge problem caused by home childcare not being taxed?
- Tax at-home work –> what is market value?
- Deductible childcare costs –> reduces tax base
What did the paper by Gelbach 2002 investigating public schooling for young children attempt to do?
Used 1980 census data to estimate the effect of public school enrolment for a woman’s five year old on labor supply and assistance receipt (subsidies):
- Finds significant effect on maternal labour supply
- Free public schoolin = 6-24% increase in supply while reducing public assistance receipt by 10%
- No effect for women with more than one child younger than 5
How are investments usually taxed in practice?
In the form of capital gain, i.e. the difference between purchase and sale price.
What are two reasons why taxes and deductions on capital gains may not actually increase risk taking?
- Less than full tax offsets for losses
- Redistributive Taxation
What are the two ways investments are taxed? How do they work?
taxed on accrual and taxed on relisation.
tax on accrual are paid in each periods on the return earned in this period.
tax on capital gains are paid when the asset is sold.
Why are capital gains taxes often necessary instead of taxes on accrual?
Because accrual may be hard to measure, for volatile assets there may be liquidity constraints.
Is tax burden lower with capital gains tax than taxation on accrual?
Yes
What are the three income boxes for taxation in the Netherlands?
Box 1 is for employment related income
Box 2 is for ownership of limited liability companies
Box 3 is for savings and investment
What are the main arguments against taxing capital gains?
- Capital gains serve as protection against inflation (although could be indexed for inflation)
- It decreases efficiency of capital transactions (sales of assets are delayed)
- Discourages entrepreneurial activity
What did the paper by Burman and Randolph (1994) investigating capital gains tax attempt to do? What was their main finding?
Use panel data to estimate variation in capital gains tax rates to estimate the effect on capital gains realisations:
- Most of the response is transitory, individuals just speed up sales they had planned anyway.
What are other kinds of taxes on capital?
Estate taxes, gift taxes
What are the main advantages of estate taxes?
- As it is extremely progressive it adds massively to gov. revenue
- Avoids concentration of wealthy dynasties
- Keep incentives for heirs to work hard
What are the main disadvantages of estate tax?
- taxing a grieving family is cruel (‘death tax’)
- since income is taxed, estate tax leads to double taxation
- sophisticated tax payers can avoid tax
What did Jakobsen et al. (2020) investigating wealth taxation attempt to do? Main findings?
Estaimte the effect of wealth taxation on wealth inequality with data from Denmark:
- Used DiD estimation strategies.
- It finds that with wealth tax, wealth formation is reduced by 19% after 8 years for the moderately wealthy, 31% for the very wealthy.
What is property tax?
A tax levied on the value of real estate, including the value of land and any structures built on the land. They are a primary source of income for the government.
What are the three school of thought on the incidence of property tax?
-The traditional view: tax is levied on two factors, land (inelastic) and buildings(elastic). Land part is borne by landowners. Buildings part may be borne by community if supply of structures more elastic than demand for a community.
- The capital tax view: taxes will chase capital out of town to other jurisdictions decreasing rate of return of capital.
- The benefits tax view: there is no burden to anyone because owners receive local public goods in exchange
What did the Surico and Trezzi paper investigating consumer spending and property taxes do in 2019?Findings?
Use Italian property tax reform of 2011 to check consumption patterns of homeowners:
after a temporary redesign of the municipal housing tax system:
- Used a DiD approach.
- Leads to large expenditure cuts on the mortgagors
- taxes on residential properties mainly affect wealthy people, hence having a lower effect on consumption
What is a corporation? How does it differ from a firm?
A legal entity owned by at least one shareholder. It comes with limited liability (incorporation), meaning that the owners cannot be held personally responsible for the firm’s obligations.
The limited liability part. For examples self-employed people are firms but not corporations.
Why should we tax firms/corporations and not labor and capital directly?
- Pure profits taxation: corporations with market power will make pure profits and taxing pure profits is not distorting the choice of production factors.
- Retained earnings: not taxing may lead to delayed payout of earnings to generate lower discounted value of the tax burden.
What is the incidence of corporate tax?
- The demand for goods the corporate sector produces is likely not perfectly elastic, so consumers bear some burden.
- The rest is passed on to labour and capital:
- Supply labour not perfectly elastic –> lower wages (some burden)
- Capital is inelastic in short run, so rate of return on non/corporate capital decreases.
Summarise the paper Djankov et al. (2010)
- it provided cross-country correlations of corporate tax rates and firm investments. Finds corporate taxes reduce investments by firms.
What are the three options firm have to finance investment?
- Use retained earnings
- Increase debt by borrowing
- Issue equity
Are dividends and debt both double taxes? Why?
No, only dividends. Because debt is more risky.
What did the paper by Heider & Ljungqvist (2015) investigating corporate taxes do?
Since higher corporate tax would make using equity to finance more expensive (dividends are taxed debt is not):
- Regressed corporate tax rates on corporate debt levels (DiD) using staggered corporate income tax changes in the US.
-The average corporate tax rate increase of 13% triggers a 4.5% increase in debt, but no such effect for tax rate decreases.
What is the dividend paradox?
Given that capital gains tax rate are lower than for dividends why should firms even pay dividends? Two possible exaplenations:
- Agency theory –> investors are willing to live with tax ineffciency in order to get money
- Signalling theory –> investors have imperfect information over firm performance, by paying dividends managers show that firm is doing well.
What does Chett & Saez investigating dividend taxes and corporate behaviour do?(2005)
It uses the dividend tax cut of 2003 to explore how lower dividend tax affects dividend payments:
- DiD with taxable and non taxable institutions.
-Documented 20% increase in dividend payments by non financial, non utility publicly traded corporations
- Response was greatest with firms principals whose tax incentives changed
- Shows that principal-agent issues play an important role