New Economics Papers
on Public Finance
Issue of 2012‒01‒10
two papers chosen by



  1. An investigation of granger causality between tax revenues and government expenditures By Hasan, Dr. Syed Akif; Subhani, Dr. Muhammad Imtiaz; Osman, Ms. Amber
  2. The Virtuous Tax: Lifesaving and Crime-Prevention Effects of the 1991 Federal Alcohol-Tax Increase By Philip J. Cook; Christine Piette Durrance

  1. By: Hasan, Dr. Syed Akif; Subhani, Dr. Muhammad Imtiaz; Osman, Ms. Amber
    Abstract: The nexus between government revenue and government expenditure always wins the attention of policy makers and think tanks while they work four making fiscal policies for an economy. This paper is an empirical investigation on the unidirectional causality between government expenditures and the revenues, which government collects from public in shape of various levied taxes. Annual data for Pakistan from the period of 1979 to 2010 for governmental expenditures and its tax revenue have been collected. While, the unidirectional and bidirectional causality were interrogated via applying Granger causality for the outlined variables. The results indicate that there is an uni-directional causality between the expenditures and revenues, which runs from tax revenues to govt. expenditures, that is the previous lags of tax revenue has a causal impact on the current govt. spending.
    Keywords: tax revenue; government expenditure; fiscal policy; granger causality;economy
    JEL: E62
    Date: 2011
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:35686&r=pub
  2. By: Philip J. Cook; Christine Piette Durrance
    Abstract: On January 1, 1991, the federal excise tax on beer doubled, and the tax rates on wine and liquor increased as well. These changes are larger than the typical state-level changes that have been used to study the effect of price on alcohol abuse and its consequences. In this paper, we develop a method to estimate some important effects of those large 1991 changes, exploiting the interstate differences in alcohol consumption. We demonstrate that the relative importance of drinking in traffic fatalities is closely tied to per capita alcohol consumption across states. As a result, we expect that the proportional effects of the federal tax increase on traffic fatalities would be positively correlated with per capita consumption. We demonstrate that this is indeed the case, and infer estimates of the price elasticity and lives saved in each state. We repeat this exercise for other injury-fatality rates, and for nine categories of crime. For each outcome, the estimated effect of the tax increase is negatively related to average consumption, and that relationship is highly significant for the overall injury death rate, the violent crime rate, and the property crime rate. A conservative estimate is that the federal tax reduced injury deaths by 4.7%, or almost 7,000, in 1991.
    JEL: H2 H23 I12 K42
    Date: 2011–12
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:17709&r=pub

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