Browsing by Author "Gugl, Elisabeth"
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Item Competition in Business Taxes and Public Services: Are Production-Based Taxes Superior to Capital Taxes?(National Tax Association, 2015) Gugl, Elisabeth; Zodrow, George R.; Baker Institute for Public PolicyAlthough most of the tax competition literature focuses on the provision of local public services to households, several papers analyze tax competition when capital taxes are used to finance local public services provided to businesses, examining the conditions under which such services are provided efficiently, under-provided, or over-provided. In addition, several prominent observers have noted that “benefit-related” business taxation is desirable on both efficiency and equity grounds and argued that such taxation should take the form of a tax based on production, such as an origin-based value-added tax. We evaluate this contention in this paper, comparing the relative efficiency properties of these alternative business taxes. Our simulation results suggest that under many, but not all, circumstances it is more efficient to finance business public services with an origin-based production tax rather than a source-based capital tax.Item Essays in intrafamily distribution and taxation(2004) Gugl, Elisabeth; Moulin, HerveThis thesis consists of three essays. In the first two essays we assume that the wife earns a lower wage rate than the husband and we analyze intrafamily distributional effects if environmental parameters such as the tax system or divorce regulations change. The third essay evaluates the efficiency of a production tax when a public service is provided to business. The first essay considers a tax reform from individual to joint taxation for couples in a one-period model. An expansion of the utility possibility set due to tax reform makes both spouses better off, if spouses apply a bargaining rule with a disagreement point outside marriage. Alternatively, if spouses receive family resources proportional to their contribution to family full income, the husband prefers joint taxation and the wife prefers individual taxation. In the model of the second essay, spouses bargain in each of two periods over the resource allocation between them using divorce as the disagreement outcome. Since each spouse's first period labor supply influences his or her second period bargaining power, the couple's labor supply decisions are no longer efficient. (1) A reduction of the tax rate of the wife when divorced increases inefficiency within marriage, but raises the wife's intertemporal utility. (2) An equal split of income between former spouses equalizes utility shares between spouses and it is less distortionary than a divorce law granting each former spouse his or her stand alone income. (3) Whenever the wife benefits from a tax reform from joint towards individual taxation of the family, inequality between spouses decreases but the husband might be worse off. In the third essay, local governments finance a public service to firms either with a tax on capital, the mobile factor, or with a tax on production. We find that in the Zodrow-Mieszkowski model a production tax is inefficient except for the case of a Cobb-Douglas technology. Using a CES production function, we show that a production tax is more efficient than a capital tax in the Zodrow-Mieszkowski model.Item Tax Competition and the Efficiency of “Benefit-Related” Business Taxes(James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy) Gugl, Elisabeth; Zodrow, George R.; James A. Baker III Institute for Public PolicyWe construct a tax competition model in which local governments finance business public services with either a source-based tax on mobile capital, such as a property tax, or a tax on production, such as an origin-based Value Added Tax, and then assess which of the two tax instruments is more efficient. Many taxes on business apply to mobile inputs or outputs, such as property taxes, retail sales taxes, and destination-based VATs, and their inefficiency has been examined in the literature; however, proposals from several prominent tax experts to utilize a local origin-based VAT have not been analyzed theoretically. Our primary finding is that the production tax is less inefficient than the capital tax under many — but not all — conditions. The intuition underlying this result is that the efficiency of a user fee on the public business input is roughly approximated by a production tax, which applies to both the public input and immobile labor (in addition to mobile capital). In marked contrast, the capital tax applies only to mobile capital and is thus likely to be relatively inefficient.