Essays on Redistributive Fiscal Policies and Macroeconomics PDF Download

Author: Mariano Eduardo Spector
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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This thesis consists of three chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 study redistributive fiscal policies. Chapter 3 analyzes the role of asymmetric information in frictional labor markets. Fiscal stimulus during the Great Recession consisted mainly of transfers, rather than government purchases. Chapter 1 analyzes the role of marginal propensities to consume (MPCs) in shaping the effect of such policies. I construct a continuous-time New Keynesian model with heterogeneous overlapping generations which allows for arbitrary MPC heterogeneity. I characterize the output multipliers of fiscal transfers, and show that the role of MPCs is mainly to determine the timing of the fiscal stimulus. The relation between this timing and the cumulative effect on output is, however, ambiguous. Indeed, I show that transfers to low-MPC consumers may generate a higher cumulative effect on output. From a normative perspective, however, there is no ambiguity: with larger differences in MPCs, optimal policy can obtain macro stabilization with smaller welfare losses. In Chapter 2, I analyze redistributive policies when households are heterogeneous with respect to both their MPCs and their risk aversion. I characterize transfer multipliers in a model in which capital is subject to uninsurable idiosyncratic risk. Based on survey data, I assume that MPCs and risk aversion are positively correlated in the population. A redistribution from low-MPC, low-risk aversion households to high-MPC, high-risk aversion households creates two opposing effects: a higher mean MPC tends to stimulate aggregate demand, but an increase in the mean risk aversion tends to depress asset prices, generating a negative income effect on consumption. In Chapter 3, I study a frictional labor market with horizontally differentiated workers. Firms have incomplete information about the skills of workers who apply to their vacancies. Workers self-insure against unemployment risk by applying to jobs for which their skills are not well suited. This decreases firms’ incentives to create vacancies by deteriorating the quality of the average applicant. Workers thus impose a negative externality on each other, which makes the equilibrium inefficient. However, although workers apply to too many jobs, I show that unemployment can be too low or too high. Welfare-improving government policies are considered.

Author: Loukas Karabarbounis
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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In all cases, men commit to a career in the market and take less home duties than women. As a result, their market work becomes less substitutable to home duty. When society resolves its distributional concerns efficiently with gender-specific lump sum transfers, GBT with higher marginal tax rates on men is optimal. The third essay examines the relationship between inequality and redistribution in a panel of OECD countries. Using panel data methods that hold constant a variety of determinants of redistributive spending, I find a non-monotonic relationship between pre-tax-and-transfer distribution of income and redistribution. Relative to mean income, a more affluent rich and middle class are associated with less redistribution and a richer poor class is associated with more redistribution. These results are consistent with a one dollar, one vote politico-economic equilibrium: When the income of a group of citizens increases, aggregate redistributive policies tilt towards this group's most preferred policies.

Author: Yu She
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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My thesis contains three chapters which focus heavily on the macroeconomic policies. The first chapter focuses on the effectiveness of monetary policy on firms with different financial constraints. The second chapter addresses on how would the optimal tax policy change the evolution of inequality. The third chapter emphasizes on how to provide a proxy means testing from a welfare perspective to a transfer program. In the first chapter, I study the role of financial constraints in the effects of monetary policy on firm investments. I construct a quarterly textual measure of financial constraints from SEC filings using a deep learning model. It improves the prediction accuracy as compared to a Naive Bayes method by capturing the context information, such as grammatical structure and order of words. Firms classified as highly constrained are younger, smaller, have a higher liquidity ratio and higher leverage ratio. However, popular proxies of financial constraints often do not move monotonically with the level of financial constraints. Particularly for the liquidity ratio, it is high for both the least constrained firms, which have ample of cash, and the most constrained firms, which hoard cash due to precautionary saving motives and the high marginal cost of external capital. Using the constructed measure of financial constraints, the investments of financially constrained firms are persistently less responsive to monetary policy shocks due to high marginal cost of external funds. This implies that monetary policy might be less effective during crisis time due to a larger fraction of constrained firms. My results reconcile previous empirical findings and argue that the seemingly contrary conclusions are, to some extent, consistent with each other. In the second chapter, it intends to address on the question: how would the optimal taxes change the evolution of wealth inequality? This paper studies this question quantitatively under a standard incomplete market heterogeneous agent model. The benchmark model captures the wealth distribution and its evolution from 1967-2010. Optimal tax policy exercise considers an once-and-for-all tax reform at 1967 accounting for the time varying economic environment and transition dynamics. With a utilitarian social planner, the optimal linear comprehensive income tax leads to a higher level inequality in wealth where top 10\% and top 1\% gain at least 5\% more wealth shares at 2010 compared to benchmark. The optimal tax under a parameterized nonlinear tax function implies a highly progressive tax system which is also highly redistributive compared to the benchmark model. The wealth inequality in this case is increasing from 1960s to mid 1990s and then start to decline to its 1960s level or even lower. At 2010, top 10\% remains roughly their wealth holdings at their 1967 level while top 1\%, 0.1\% and 0.01\% wealth holding even decrease on average about 2\% compared to their low level at year 1967. In the last chapter, I propose a new proxy means testing method with minimizing welfare loss as the target instead of traditional targets such as minimizing consumption loss. In a simple economy with a utilitarian social planner, the welfare approach is equivalent to a weighted logistic regression with inverse consumption as weights. As a result, it focuses mainly on the exclusion error where poor are identified as non-poor and less weights on the inclusion error where non-poor are identified as poor. Using the socio-economic survey data in India in 2011, I compare the targeting performance of the welfare approach to other standard approaches in PMT. It shows that the welfare approach enjoys a lower exclusion error rate by sacrificing the inclusion error rate and does not out-perform the traditional method. It does, on the other hand, provide a welfare foundation for the poverty weighted least square method.

Author: Karen Davtyan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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"The general objective of the doctoral thesis is to evaluate the distributive effects of macroeconomic policies. In particular, the thesis assesses the distributional impact of fiscal policy, conventional and unconventional monetary policies. The distributive effect of fiscal policy is examined by analyzing the interrelations among economic growth, income inequality, and fiscal performance based on the evidence from the Anglo-Saxon countries. These interrelations are analyzed jointly in a system by examining also transmission channels among them. All the variables are regarded as endogenous within the framework of the structural vector autoregression methodology. This allows exploring dynamic interactions among the variables and feedback effects on each other through impulse response functions. In addition, the thesis provides new evidence on interrelations among economic growth, income inequality, and fiscal performance by employing the longest possible consistently measured data on income inequality on a country basis. The obtained results show that there are differences in the obtained results for the countries. Particularly, income inequality has negative effect on economic growth in the case of the UK while its effect is positive in the cases of the USA and Canada. The increase in inequality worsens fiscal performance for all the countries. Government spending reduces income inequality in the UK but it raises inequality in the USA and Canada. In addition, the results also indicate that tax revenues generally raise income inequality in all the considered countries. Thus, the measures of the fiscal policy channel are important tools to consider in the design of the policies to decrease inequality. The academic literature generally views fiscal policy as a measure to address growing income inequality, which is a widespread concern nowadays. Although the income distribution could also be affected by monetary policy, the distributive effects of monetary policy have not broadly been discussed in the literature. Taking this into account, the thesis contributes to the discussion in this research area by evaluating the effect of monetary policy on income inequality. The distributional effect of monetary policy is estimated in the case of the USA, where the dynamics in income inequality has mainly been driven by the variation in the upper end of distribution since early 1980's. Consequently, the thesis uses an inequality measure that represents the whole distribution of income. To identify a monetary policy shock, the thesis employs contemporaneous identification with ex-ante identified monetary policy shocks as well as log run identification. In particular, a cointegration relation has been determined among the considered variables and the vector error correction methodology has been applied for the identification of the monetary policy shock. The obtained results indicate that contractionary monetary policy decreases the overall income inequality in the country. These results could have important implications for the design of policies to reduce income inequality by giving more weight to monetary policy. In the wake of the global financial crisis, central banks have generally begun to implement unconventional monetary policy together with conventional policy measures. There are already numerous studies on the impact of unconventional monetary policy measures on financial market as well as on their macroeconomic effect. However, the distributive effect of unconventional monetary policy has not essentially been examined yet. The thesis fills this gap by evaluating the distributive impact of unconventional monetary policy in comparison with the distributional effect of conventional monetary policy. The distributional effects of conventional and unconventional monetary policies are evaluated for the USA. The distributive impact of conventional monetary policy is explored through contractionary policy shocks. At the same time, the distributional effect of unconventional monetary policy is studied via expansionary policy shocks. The obtained results indicate that conventional monetary policy reduces income inequality while unconventional monetary policy raises it. In particular, the distributive impact of conventional monetary policy is stronger. The results also show that the both conventional and unconventional monetary policies significantly affect the upper part of income distribution. While conventional monetary policy does not significantly affect the lower part of income distribution, unconventional monetary policy has still a significant impact on it. In addition, the implemented variance decomposition analysis assesses the relative importance of conventional and unconventional monetary policy shocks in the variation of Gini index of income inequality. The obtained results indicate that the unconventional monetary policy shock explains the higher share of the variation in Gini index than the conventional monetary policy shock."--TDX.

Author: I. G. Patel
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 134918358X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Research papers, economic policy, economic development, India - examines development policy, trade policy, balance of payments, agricultural policy, inflation, income distribution, economic planning, productivity policy, etc.; studies the repercussions on employment, basic needs fulfilment, low income families, etc; evaluates the impact on developing countries of development aid, economic aid and economic cooperation.

Author: François Courtoy
Publisher: Presses universitaires de Louvain
ISBN: 9782390612391
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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This thesis contributes to two fields of macroeconomics. The first two chapters contribute to the literature that investigates the role of household heterogeneity, in terms of marginal propensity to consume and labor income, for the 'optimal' design of fiscal policies. The first chapter explores how the introduction of household heterogeneity alters the prescriptions derived from the standard optimal fiscal policy framework that only accounts for a representative agent. When heterogeneity is accounted for the government uses taxation and transfers as a redistributing device that only partially corrects for fluctuations in income inequality. The second chapter builds on the results of the first. It develops a quantitative model that is estimated with US data on income and consumption dispersion among households. The model is then used to assess the relevance of the actual US fiscal policy. Unexpectedly, it concludes that the US fiscal policy is close to optimal. The third chapter contributes to the literature that is at the crossroad of the fields of history of macroeconomics and of macroeconomic pedagogy. It aims at reflecting on the theory used in the first two chapters of the thesis and in the teaching of macroeconomics. It identifies and discuss the deep methodological discrepancy between the theory used in research and graduate macroeconomics courses, on the one hand, and in undergraduate macroeconomic courses, in the other hand.

Author: Gergő Motyovszki
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Macroeconomics
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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This thesis is composed of three independent chapters, but all centered around the broader topic of how macroeconomic policies interact with various aspects of household heterogeneity. Monetary Policy and Inequality under Labor Market Frictions and Capital-Skill Complementarity We provide a new channel through which monetary policy has distributional consequences at business cycle frequencies. We show that an unexpected monetary easing increases labor income inequality between high and less-skilled workers. In particular, this effect is prominent in sectors intensive in less-skilled labor, that exhibit high degree of capital-skill complementarity (CSC) and are subject to matching inefficiencies. To rationalize these findings we build a New Keynesian DSGE model with asymmetric search and matching (SAM) frictions across the two types of workers and CSC in the production function. We show that CSC on its own introduces a dynamic demand amplification mechanism: the increase in high-skilled employment after a monetary expansion makes complementary capital more productive, encouraging a further rise in investment demand and creating a multiplier effect. SAM asymmetries magnify this channel. Monetary-Fiscal Interactions and Redistribution in Small Open Economies Ballooning public debts in the wake of the covid-19 pandemic can present monetary-fiscal policies with a dilemma if and when neutral real interest rates rise, which might arrive sooner in emerging markets: policymakers can stabilize debts either by relying on fiscal adjustments (AM-PF) or by tolerating higher inflation (PM-AF). The choice between these policy mixes affects the efficacy of the fiscal expansion already today and can interact with the distributive properties of the stimulus across heterogeneous households. To study this, I build a two agent New Keynesian (TANK) small open economy model with monetary-fiscal interactions. Targeting fiscal transfers more towards high-MPC agents increases the output multiplier of a fiscal stimulus, while raising the degree of deficitfinancing for these transfers also helps. However, precise targeting is much more important under the AM-PF regime than the question of financing, while the opposite is the case with a PM-AF policy mix: then deficit-spending is crucial for the size of the multiplier, and targeting matters less. Under the PM-AF regime fiscal stimulus entails a real exchange rate depreciation which might offset "import leakage" by stimulating net exports, if the share of hand-to-mouth households is low and trade is price elastic enough. Therefore, a PM-AF policy mix might break the Mundell-Fleming prediction that open economies have smaller fiscal multipliers relative to closed economies. Weak Wage Recovery and Precautionary Motives after a Credit Crunch During the economic recovery following the financial crisis many advanced economies saw subdued wage dynamics, in spite of falling unemployment and an increasingly tight labour market. We propose a mechanism which can account for this puzzle and work against usual aggregate demand channels. In a heterogeneous agent model with incomplete markets we endogenize uninsurable idiosyncratic risk through search-and-matching (SAM) frictions in the labour market. In this setting, apart from the usual precautionary saving behaviour, households can self-insure also by settling for lower wages in order to secure a job and thereby avoid becoming borrowing constrained. This channel is especially pronounced for asset-poor agents, already close to the constraint. We introduce a credit crunch into this framework modelled as a gradual tightening of the borrowing constraint (and utilizing a continuous time approach, known as HACT). The perfect foresight transition dynamics feature falling wages despite a tightening labour market and expanding employment. As households suddenly find themselves closer to the borrowing constraint, the increased precautionary motive drives them to accept lower wages in the bargaining process, while firms respond to this by posting more vacancies, leading to a tighter labour market and falling unemployment. If the household deleveraging pressure is persistent enough after the credit crunch, it can explain the weak wage recovery in spite of already stronger aggregate demand.

Author: Antoine Camous
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiscal policy
Languages : en
Pages : 114

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This thesis investigates the design of appropriate institutions to ensure the good conduct of fiscal and monetary policy. The three chapters develop theoretical frameworks to address the time-inconsistency of policy plans or prevent the occurrence of self-fulfilling prophecies. Time-inconsistency refers to a situation where preferences over policy change over time. Optimal policy plans are not credible, since agents anticipate the implementation of another policy in the future. This issue is particularly pervasive to monetary policy, since nominal quantities (price level, interest rates, etc.) are very sensitive to expected policies, but predetermined to actual policy choices. The first chapter investigates how fiscal policy can mitigate the inflation bias of monetary policy in an economy with heterogeneous agents. Whenever there is a desire for redistribution, progressive fiscal helps to implement a policy mix less biased toward inflation. Importantly, even the richest supports some fiscal progressivity, since over their life cycle, they benefit from a more balanced policy-mix. A self-fulfilling prophecy, or coordination failure, refers to a situation where a more desirable economic outcome could be reached, but fail to be, by the only effect of pessimistic expectations. Self-fulfilling debt crises are a classical example: pessimistic investors bid down the price of debt, which increases the likelihood of default, which in turn justifies the initial decrease in price. The second chapter, co-authored with Russell Cooper, asks whether monetary policy can deter self-fulfilling debt crises. The analysis shows how a counter-cyclical inflation policy with commitment is effective in doing so. Importantly, it can be implemented without endangering the primary objective of monetary policy, to deliver an inflation target for instance. The third chapter, co-authored with Andrew Gimber, revisits the classic Laffer curve coordination failure: taxes could be low, but they are high because agents anticipate high tax rates. In a dynamic environment with debt issuance, the multiplicity of equilibria critically depends on inherited debt. At high levels of public debt, fiscal policy is pro-cyclical: taxes increase when output decreases, and self-fulfilling fiscal crisis can occur. Overall, this chapter sheds light on the perils of high level of public debt.

Author: Tom Church
Publisher: Hoover Press
ISBN: 0817919066
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Drawing from a 2014 Hoover Institution Conference on Inequality in honor of Gary Becker, a group of distinguished contributors explore various measures of inequality in America and address the issue of whether or not it is increasing. In looking at this question and examining policy implications, the authors draw on research on human capital and intergenerational mobility. The authors suggest that the emphasis on inequality and redistribution, while not wrong, is nevertheless misplaced, for it may lead us to adopt policies that will disrupt the progress we have made while doing nothing to promote the kind of growth that is essential to national progress.

Author: Mr.Jonathan David Ostry
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
ISBN: 1484397657
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 30

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The Fund has recognized in recent years that one cannot separate issues of economic growth and stability on one hand and equality on the other. Indeed, there is a strong case for considering inequality and an inability to sustain economic growth as two sides of the same coin. Central to the Fund’s mandate is providing advice that will enable members’ economies to grow on a sustained basis. But the Fund has rightly been cautious about recommending the use of redistributive policies given that such policies may themselves undercut economic efficiency and the prospects for sustained growth (the so-called “leaky bucket” hypothesis written about by the famous Yale economist Arthur Okun in the 1970s). This SDN follows up the previous SDN on inequality and growth by focusing on the role of redistribution. It finds that, from the perspective of the best available macroeconomic data, there is not a lot of evidence that redistribution has in fact undercut economic growth (except in extreme cases). One should be careful not to assume therefore—as Okun and others have—that there is a big tradeoff between redistribution and growth. The best available macroeconomic data do not support such a conclusion.