Volkswirtschaft - Open Access LMU - Teil 01/03 Archiv
250 Episoden
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Uzawa (1961) has shown that balanced growth requires technological progress to be strictly Harrod neutral (purely labor-augmenting). This paper offers a slightly more general variant of the theorem that does not require assumptions about savings behavior or factor pricing and is much easier to prove.
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We develop a model in which multinational investors decide about the modes of organization, the locations of production, and the markets to be served. Foreign investments are driven by market-seeking and cost-reducing motives. We further assume that investors face costs of control that vary among sectors and increase in distance. The results show that (i) production intensive sectors are more likely to operate a foreign business independent of the investment motive, (ii) that distance may have a non-monotonous effect on the likelihood of horizontal investments, and (iii) that globalization, if understood as reducing distance, leads to more integration.
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This note critically evaluates the New Classical Macroeconomics from a Marshallian perspective. Revisiting the famous Keynes-Tinbergen controversy, it is argued that Keynes' criticism comprises the "Lucas critique," and that it is misleading to label this a critique of Keynesian economics. The postulate of immutable economic structures carries Tinbergen's approach to the extreme and neglects the possibility of slowly changing structures, as conceived by Marshall. The position is defended by arguments about equilibrium and rationality that are admittedly empty.
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This paper analyses the development of the ratio of corporate taxes to wage taxes using a simple political economy model with internationally mobile and immobile firms. Among other results, our model predicts that countries reduce their corporate tax rate, relative to the wage tax, either when preferences for public goods increase or when a rising share of capital is employed in multinational firms. The predicted relationships are tested using panel data for 23 OECD countries for the period 1980 through 2001. The results of the empirical analysis support our central hypotheses.
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Using simple benchmark models, this paper gives an introductory analysis of three separate policy issues that relate to the taxation of multinational firms: (i) the spread of tax measures that provide discriminatory tax relief to multinational firms; (ii) the switch from the current separate accounting system to a consolidated corporate tax base with formula apportionment; (iii) the introduction of a minimum statutory corporate tax rate in a geographically restricted area. Prior to these analyses, we briefly survey some of the empirical evidence on both the general development of corporate taxation in Europe and the OECD, and on the tax preferences granted to multinational firms.
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The article advances the hypothesis that Germany is unable to increase its gains from trade despite increasing trading volumes. High and rigid German wages argely result from the minimum wage constraint imposed by a welfare state that offers generous replacement incomes. Confronted by low-wage competition from post-communist countries, Germany overspecializes in capital intensive goods, which creates a pathological export boom in terms of added value produced in exports. In addition, the country overspecializes in downstream activities, which implies that export quantities grow faster than value added. The reasons which induce extremely high exports are the same as those which cause unemployment to rise and the economy to stagnate.
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The hallmark of the recent development and growth literature is a quest to identify institutions that explain a significant portion of the observed differences in living standards across countries. Empirical work in the area focuses almost exclusively on either the global sample or on developing nations. Certainly it is important to know which institutions are lacking in these developing countries, but the analysis provides little evidence for us to know to what extend a common set of institutions actually matters in advanced and developing countries. In this paper we examine parameter heterogeneity in prominent approaches to institutions and economic performance. We find that a new set of instruments is necessary to control for endogeneity, but that a common set of economically important institutions does indeed exist among advanced and developing nations. The impact of these institutions does vary substantially across samples; it is about three times as high in developing countries as compared to OECD countries.
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We formulate a model to explain why the lack of political competition may stifle economic performance and use the United States as a testing ground for the model’s predictions, exploiting the 1965 Voting Rights Act which helped break the near monpoly on political power of the Democrats in southern states. We find statistically robust evidence that changes in political competition have quantitatively important effects on state income growth, state policies, and quality of Governors. By our bottom-line estimate, the increase in political competition triggered by the Voting Rights Act raised long-run per capita income in the average affected state by about 20 percent.
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This paper explores to what extent secondary policy issues are infuenced by electoral incentives. We develop a two dimensional political agency model in which a politician decides on both a frontline policy issue and a secondary policy issue. The model predicts when the incumbent should manipulate the secondary policy to attract voters. We test our model by using panel data on environmental policy choices in the U.S. states. In contrast to the popular view that secondary policies are largely determined by lobbying, we find strong effects of electoral incentives.
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We show experimentally that fairness concerns may have a decisive impact on the actual and optimal choice of contracts in a moral hazard context. Bonus contracts that offer a voluntary and unenforceable bonus for satisfactory performance provide powerful incentives and are superior to explicit incentive contracts when there are some fair-minded players. But trust contracts that pay a generous wage upfront are less efficient than incentive contracts. The principals understand this and predominantly choose the bonus contracts. Our results are consistent with recently developed theories of fairness, which offer important new insights into the interaction of contract choices, fairness and incentives.
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In many countries, governments involve interest groups at early stages of political decisionmaking. The idea of this is to enhance the legitimacy of the policy decision and to curb later opposition to the implementation of the policy. We show that the way and timing of interest groups involvement can be crucial for the scope and success of policy reforms. When interest groups influence both the policy choice, or legislation, and the subsequent decision on the implementation of the policy, their early involvement may lead them to oppose the reform more than if they had been excluded from the legislation stage.
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We analyze a sequential game between two symmetric countries when firms can invest in a multinational structure that confers tax savings. Governments are able to commit to long-run tax discrimination policies before firms' decisions are made and before statutory capital tax rates are chosen non-cooperatively. Whether a coordinated reduction in the tax preferences granted to mobile firms is beneficial or harmful for the competing countries depends critically on the elasticity with which the firms' organizational structure responds to tax discrimination incentives. The model can be applied to recent policy initiatives that aim at a ban on preferential tax regimes and at reducing the profit shifting opportunities for multinational firms.
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This paper investigates the impact of emigration on the political choice regarding the size of the welfare state. Mobility has two countervailing effects: the political participation effect and the tax base effect. With emigration, the composition of the constituency changes. This increases the political influence of the less mobile part of the population. The new political majority has to take into account that emigration reduces tax revenues and thereby affects the feasible set of redistribution policies. The interaction of the two e¤ects has so far not been analyzed in isolation. We find that the direction of the total e¤ect of migration depends on the initial income distribution in the economy. Our results also contribute to the empirical debate on the validity of the median-voter approach for explaining the relation between income inequality and redistribution levels.
