Fiscal Studies最新文献

{"title":"Is it time to reboot welfare economics? Overview","authors":"Diane Coyle,&nbsp;Mark Fabian,&nbsp;Eric Beinhocker,&nbsp;Tim Besley,&nbsp;Margaret Stevens","doi":"10.1111/1475-5890.12334","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1475-5890.12334","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The contributions of economists have long included both positive explanations of how economic systems work and normative recommendations for how they could and should work better. In recent decades, economics has taken a strong empirical turn as well as having a greater appreciation of the importance of the complexities of real-world human behaviour, institutions, the strengths and failures of markets, and interlinkages with other systems, including politics, technology, culture and the environment. This shift has also brought greater relevance and pragmatism to normative economics. While this shift towards evidence and pragmatism has been welcome, it does not in itself answer the core question of what exactly constitutes ‘better’, and for whom, and how to manage inevitable conflicts and trade-offs in society. These have long been the core concerns of welfare economics. Yet, in the 1980s and 1990s, debates on welfare economics seemed to have become marginalised. The articles in this <i>Fiscal Studies</i> symposium engage with the question of how to revive normative questions as a central issue in economic scholarship.</p>","PeriodicalId":51602,"journal":{"name":"Fiscal Studies","volume":"44 2","pages":"109-121"},"PeriodicalIF":7.3,"publicationDate":"2023-08-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1475-5890.12334","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42309510","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"New approaches to measuring welfare","authors":"Kristen Cooper,&nbsp;Mark Fabian,&nbsp;Christian Krekel","doi":"10.1111/1475-5890.12333","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1475-5890.12333","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Economics has traditionally understood ‘welfare’ (what makes a life go well) as the satisfaction of preference. This conceptualisation of welfare is typically measured using revealed preferences, proxied through income and prices or stated in willingness-to-pay surveys. Recent decades have seen growing challenges to this paradigm. The climate crisis, among other phenomena, has called into question whether income and price data effectively proxy preferences, and willingness-to-pay surveys continue to struggle with accurately pricing important items such as biodiversity, digital goods, privacy and social connections. Preference satisfaction as a welfare criterion has also been challenged conceptually by psychologists and scholars working in the development space, among others. In this article, we review recent innovations in alternate ways of conceptualising and measuring welfare for the purposes of economic welfare analysis. We focus on using stated preferences over aspects of well-being, life-satisfaction scales and the WELLBY approach, and well-being frameworks such as Bhutan's Gross National Happiness Index. While not without weaknesses, these approaches also have marked strengths relative to the traditional approach.</p>","PeriodicalId":51602,"journal":{"name":"Fiscal Studies","volume":"44 2","pages":"123-135"},"PeriodicalIF":7.3,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1475-5890.12333","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43238979","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Teaching economics as though values matter","authors":"Erik Angner","doi":"10.1111/1475-5890.12336","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1475-5890.12336","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Economics is permeated with value judgements, and removing them would be neither possible nor desirable. They are consequential, in the sense that they have a sizeable impact on economists’ output. Yet many economists may not even realise they are there. This paper surveys ways in which values influence economic theory and practice and explores some implications for the manner in which economics – especially welfare economics – is taught, practised and communicated. Explicit attention to values needs to be embedded in the teaching of economics at all levels.</p>","PeriodicalId":51602,"journal":{"name":"Fiscal Studies","volume":"44 2","pages":"161-169"},"PeriodicalIF":7.3,"publicationDate":"2023-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1475-5890.12336","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45161340","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"On the marginal cost of public funds: the implications of charitable giving and warm glow","authors":"Zhiyong An","doi":"10.1111/1475-5890.12337","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1475-5890.12337","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper highlights the important impact of charitable giving and warm glow on the identification of the marginal cost of public funds (MCF). We employ the warm glow model of charitable giving to describe taxpayer behaviour, whereas we employ the standard model to evaluate social welfare. We first identify the impact theoretically. Then we conduct simulations to quantify its size numerically. The results of our numerical simulations show that the standard model underestimates the magnitude of MCF by at least 10 per cent. Our work suggests that adopting a non-welfarist social welfare function can make a significant difference to the identification of MCF.</p>","PeriodicalId":51602,"journal":{"name":"Fiscal Studies","volume":"44 3","pages":"299-307"},"PeriodicalIF":7.3,"publicationDate":"2023-08-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45986204","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Pension benchmarks: empirical estimation and results for the United States and Germany","authors":"Christian Dudel,&nbsp;Julian Schmied","doi":"10.1111/1475-5890.12338","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1475-5890.12338","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Benchmark replacement rates are a key parameter for retirement plans. Often, a pension level of around 70 per cent of net income during working life is considered as an adequate choice. However, this heuristic value is left unjustified, and data-based benchmarks are limited. In this paper, we propose to estimate a pension-level benchmark based on keeping the living standard achieved during working life constant after retirement. Applying parametric, semi-parametric and non-parametric estimation methods to data from the United States and Germany, we find that a net pension income of around 100 per cent of the last net working-life income, plus or minus 10 percentage points, is required to keep the living standard constant. However, we also find that the outcome of the exercise can depend on how ‘living standards’ are measured.</p>","PeriodicalId":51602,"journal":{"name":"Fiscal Studies","volume":"44 2","pages":"171-188"},"PeriodicalIF":7.3,"publicationDate":"2023-08-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1475-5890.12338","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42733592","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Comment on ‘What taxpayers, governments and tax economists do – and what they should do’","authors":"Paul Johnson","doi":"10.1111/1475-5890.12330","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1475-5890.12330","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;Many economists working on tax policy, including my colleagues at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), advocate for reforms which we believe will improve the efficiency and equity of the tax system. Equalising tax rates across different forms of income rather than treating self-employment and business income more favourably than income earned by employees, a uniform VAT rate rather than extensive exemptions and zero rating, and reducing or abolishing stamp duty land tax and increasing and reforming council tax, are just three among many such reforms. We feel we are on solid ground in arguing for change, yet change does not happen.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The justifications by policymakers and politicians for lack of reform are unequivocal. The latter will point to the political difficulties. Whatever the strength of the case for putting VAT on food or increasing council tax, the sales job, with an eye to re-election, is just too hard. However generous the compensation package, a broad extension of VAT would cause a political backlash. The failed attempt to extend it in full to domestic fuel consumption in the early 1990s has not been forgotten. Stamp duty may be a staggeringly damaging tax, but it is collected at the point of a very large transaction, is not especially unpopular, and most is paid by those buying expensive properties. Why give it up? Any reform to council tax would cause losers, and it is already an unpopular tax.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Those in the Treasury or the revenue department make a similar point differently: the single overwhelmingly most important aspect of tax design so far as they are concerned is to make sure the revenue rolls in. Whatever the theoretical case for major reforms, if the current system isn't broken, don't try to fix it. It may look broken to those of us concerned with its efficiency, equity or complexity, but not to those who know that, in the UK context, it will yield them £1 trillion a year without too much trouble. I have had that conversation too many times to recount.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's also why one of the biggest tax cuts of recent years has come in the reverse way – fuel duty has been frozen in nominal terms for 13 years, representing a huge real-terms cut. Raising it each year in line with prices is not a real increase, but it looks like one. We have discovered that the longer it is frozen, the harder it is to unfreeze. An annual inflationary increase used to be expected and accepted. That norm has changed. Which at least is evidence that norms can be changed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Money illusion of this kind certainly influences policy decisions. Whether the use of fiscal drag tips us into a situation where ‘intentional imperfect taxpayer education becomes deliberate deception’ is perhaps moot.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;This raises questions for all concerned. Are there more effective ways of making the case for rational reform? What reforms that at least move us in the right direction might be palatable? Do we have credible ways of estimating a cost of imperfect ta","PeriodicalId":51602,"journal":{"name":"Fiscal Studies","volume":"45 1","pages":"21-23"},"PeriodicalIF":7.3,"publicationDate":"2023-08-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1475-5890.12330","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46522661","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Correction to ‘Mortality inequality in England over the past 20 years’","authors":"","doi":"10.1111/1475-5890.12332","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1475-5890.12332","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Banks, J., Cattan, S., Kraftman, L. and Krutikova, S. (2021), Mortality inequality in England over the past 20 years. <i>Fiscal Studies</i>, 42, 47–77. https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-5890.12266</p><p>In the above article, the legend on Figure 7 needs to be changed to the following:</p><p>• Deaths of despair, Neoplasms, Disease of the respiratory system</p><p>• Diabetes, Ischaemic heart disease, Stroke (cerebrovascular)</p><p>• Other circulatory, Unintentional injuries, All other</p><p>We apologise for this error.</p><p>The updated figure is as follows:</p>","PeriodicalId":51602,"journal":{"name":"Fiscal Studies","volume":"44 2","pages":"219-220"},"PeriodicalIF":7.3,"publicationDate":"2023-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1475-5890.12332","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47063538","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Twenty-five years of income inequality in Britain: the role of wages, household earnings and redistribution","authors":"Jonathan Cribb,&nbsp;Robert Joyce,&nbsp;Thomas Wernham","doi":"10.1111/1475-5890.12331","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-5890.12331","url":null,"abstract":"<p>We study earnings and income inequality in Britain over the 25 years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. We focus on the middle 90 per cent of the income distribution, within which the gap between top and bottom in 2019–20 was essentially the same, after taxes and transfers, as a quarter-century earlier. This has led to a narrative of ‘stable inequality’, which we argue misses important nuances and key lessons from the UK's experience. In particular, there have been periods in which household earnings inequalities were changing considerably but tax and transfer policy was offsetting its effects on income inequality – in different directions at different times, reflecting sharp changes of policy approach. Means-tested transfers played a crucial role in containing inequality during the ‘inclusive growth’ period of the 1990s and early 2000s, as well as the Great Recession. During the 2010s, the minimum wage emerged as the government's primary policy tool for boosting incomes, but this happened almost simultaneously with cutbacks to means-tested transfers, meaning that household earnings inequalities fell considerably and yet net income inequality rose.</p>","PeriodicalId":51602,"journal":{"name":"Fiscal Studies","volume":"44 3","pages":"251-274"},"PeriodicalIF":7.3,"publicationDate":"2023-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1475-5890.12331","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50152388","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The unusual French policy mix towards labour market inequalities","authors":"Antoine Bozio","doi":"10.1111/1475-5890.12329","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1475-5890.12329","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This short paper presents an overview of the French policy mix towards labour market inequalities, consisting of a high minimum wage together with targeted payroll tax cuts around the minimum wage. It reviews the recent literature documenting the impact of that policy mix on employment and wage inequality. The main takeaways are that pre-tax wage inequality has been increasing in France rather like it has in the UK and the US, while net wage inequality has decreased and then remained stable. The employment experience for the middle age group is also very close in France to the one in the UK and the US, while it differs markedly at young and older ages. The paper offers two more general thoughts on how to make progress in comparing policy options. First, most studies tend to give too much weight to tax and benefit reforms in being able to reduce inequality as they disregard incidence mechanisms, and fail to incorporate properly longer-term effects of other policies on pre-tax inequality. Second, the design of effective policy should always incorporate simplicity and salience. Failure to do so is likely to lead to little expected impact of such policies.</p>","PeriodicalId":51602,"journal":{"name":"Fiscal Studies","volume":"45 1","pages":"43-54"},"PeriodicalIF":7.3,"publicationDate":"2023-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46472042","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"What taxpayers, governments and tax economists do – and what they should do","authors":"Joel Slemrod","doi":"10.1111/1475-5890.12324","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1475-5890.12324","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The distinction between positive economics – describing economic programmes, situations and conditions as they exist – and normative economics – prescribing policies – has a long history. It is an especially important distinction in public economics, which by its nature concerns the actions of government. In this essay, I consider how two relatively recent developments in tax economics alter, blur or at least complicate the classic distinctions between positive and normative economics. The two developments I address are the insights generated by the study of behavioural economics and increased attention to tax evasion and tax enforcement. I organise my thoughts by addressing how three sets of actors central to public finance actually behave and should behave – taxpayers, governments and tax economists. I argue that tax economics should take seriously the substantial presence of behavioural anomalies and tax evasion, and that it has already begun to do so. I suggest some directions this effort might profitably take.</p>","PeriodicalId":51602,"journal":{"name":"Fiscal Studies","volume":"45 1","pages":"7-19"},"PeriodicalIF":7.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1475-5890.12324","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47835813","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}