Browsing by Division "FGN - Institute of Economics"

This paper proposes a growth-oriented dual-income tax by combining an allowance for corporate equity with a broadly defined flat tax on personal capital income. Revenue losses are compensated by an increase in the value added tax. The paper demonstrates the neutrality properties of the reform with respect to investment, firm financial decisions and organizational choice. Tax rates are chosen to prevent income shifting from labor to capital income. The reform decisively strengthens investment of domestically owned firms as well as home and foreign based multinationals and boosts savings. Simulations with a calibrated growth model for Switzerland indicate that the reform could add between 2 to 3 percent of GDP in the long run, depending on the specific scenario. Given the slow nature of capital accumulation, it also imposes considerable costs in the short run. We also consider a tax smoothing scenario to offset the intergenerationally redistributive effects.

The main issue raised in this note is the nonequivalence between the infinite-horizon model where agents are infinitely lived and the successive generations model with altruistic finitely lived agents: in the presence of a nonnegative bequest requirement, endowment heterogeneity imposes a revision of the acritical adoption of the infinitely lived agent representation in modern macro-economics. By analysing nonstationary monetary equilibria in a reinterpretation of Townsend's "turnpike" model, this paper shows how the traditional issues of market inefficiency and indeterminacy of overlapping generations models carry over into modern macroeconomics through the natural finiteness of human lives despite "well behaved" Ricardian altruism.

This paper shows that marginally progressive taxation may help independent agents to sustain cooperation in a repeated prisoners' dilemma setting. It is suggested that political support for progressive taxation schemes may be affected by the desire to promote more cooperation among individuals.

macroeconomics, instructor's manual

There is a large body of literature on the effect of educational resources on student performance, such as teacher qualification, class size, and physical resources in school. It is dominated by empirical studies which often find ambiguous effects of resource spending on student outcomes. The unique contribution of this paper is the provision of a framework to study educational production with differentiated input factors, which allows for closed-form solutions. We try to interpret the empirical findings on the basis of a simple theoretical model of educational production: Class size, employed school resources and student effort are endogenously determined in order to account for differences in educational achievement. We also discuss the choice of integrated vs. segregated classes. Optimum class size and school quality increase with higher discipline, while in equilibrium overall classroom disruption is equal in all classes.

In this study, we predict a pattern of offshoring and reshoring over the course of economic development. We achieve this, by extending Grossman and Rossi-Hansberg's (2008) model of offshoring in a simple way by assuming that offshoring requires both workers and capital in the offshored country. As a consequence, the accumulation of capital in the offshored country has two opposing effects on offshoring. On the one hand, it increases the wage rate of workers rendering offshoring less attractive. On the other hand, it decreases the rental price of capital rendering offshoring more attractive. Putting these two effects together, we analytically generate the inverted-U pattern of offshoring recently observed in China.

In this paper I develop a formal theory of campaign communications. Voters have priors about the quality of candidates' policies in the different policy issues and about the issues' relative importance. Candidates spend time or money (TV ads, public speeches, etc.) in an effort to influence voters' decision at the ballot. Influence has two simultaneous effects: (i) it increases the quality of the policy in the issue as perceived by the voters through policy advertising and (ii) it makes the issue more salient through issue priming, thereby increasing the issue's perceived importance. A strategy is an allocation of influence activities to the different issues or topics. I show conditions under which candidates' strategies converge or diverge, which issues - if any - will dominate the campaign, and under what conditions candidates are forced to focus on issues in which they are perceived to be weak. I develop a set of novel testable predictions and discuss the model's predictive power by example of the 2008 presidential campaign in the U.S.

This paper analyzes a tug-of-war contest between two teams. In each round of the tug-of-war, a pair of agents from the opposing teams competes in a private value all-pay auction with asymmetric value distributions and effort effectiveness. Whichever team arrives first at a given lead in terms of battle victories over the opponent wins the tug-of-war. There exists a unique Markov-perfect equilibrium in bidding strategies which depend on the respective player's valuation and the current state of the tug-of-war. We derive rich comparative statics for this equilibrium by using the fact that the state of the tug-of-war evolves according to a time-homogeneous absorbing Markov chain.