New Economics Papers
on Public Finance
Issue of 2009‒01‒10
two papers chosen by



  1. The taxation of capital returns in overlapping generations economies without financial assets By Julio Dávila
  2. Balanced-Budget Rule, distortionary taxes and Aggregate Instability: A Comment By Aurélien Saidi

  1. By: Julio Dávila (CES - Centre d'économie de la Sorbonne - CNRS : UMR8174 - Université Panthéon-Sorbonne - Paris I, EEP-PSE - Ecole d'Économie de Paris - Paris School of Economics - Ecole d'Économie de Paris, CORE - Université Catholique de Louvain)
    Abstract: I show in this paper that in an overlapping generations economy with production à la Diamond (1970) in which the agents can only save in terms of capital (i.e. with not asset bubbles à la Tirole (1985) or public debt as in Diamond (1965)), there is a period-by-period balanced fiscal policy supporting a steady state allocation that Pareto-improves upon the laissez-faire competitive equilibrium steady state (whithout having to resort to intergenerational transfers) if there is no first generation or the economy starts there. A transition from the competitive equilibrium steady state to this other allocation is also Pareto-improving if the former is dynamically inefficient, but even in the dynamically efficient case if the elasticity of output to capital is high enough. This intervention allows every subsequent generation to attain, as a competitive equilibrium outcome, the highest utility attainable at a steady state through the existing markets for the consumption good and the production factors. The active fiscal policy consists of taxing (or subsidizing, in the dynamically efficient case) linearly the returns to capital, while balancing the budget period by period through a lump-sum transfer (or tax, respectively) on second period income. This policy does not finance any public spending, since there is none in the model. The only purpose of the intervention is to decentralize as a competitive equilibrium the steady state allocation that maximizes the utility of the representative agent among all steady state allocations attainable through the existing markets.
    Keywords: Taxation of capital, overlapping generations.
    Date: 2008–11
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:cesptp:halshs-00348923_v1&r=pub
  2. By: Aurélien Saidi
    Abstract: It has been shown that under perfect competition and constant returns-to-scale, a one-sector growth model may exhibit local indeterminacy when income tax rates are endogenously determined by a balanced-budget rule while government expendi- tures are fixed. This paper shows that the associated aggregate instability does not ensue from the local indeterminacy of a specific stationary equilibrium but from the multiplicity of the stationary equilibria and persists under local determinacy of all of them. We provide a global analysis of the Schmitt-Grohe and Uribe model [1997] and study specific cases that were not investigated in the original paper, when aggregate instability is inherited from the coexistence of two saddle-path equilibria on one hand and from the connection of the two steady states on the other hand.
    Keywords: Balanced-budget rule, Increasing returns, Indeterminacy, Saddle-sink connection
    JEL: E32 E4 E62 H61 O42 O47
    Date: 2008
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:drm:wpaper:2008-44&r=pub

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