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Zonder onderwerpscode: economie

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This paper presents a simple agency model to explain why third-party income reporting by employers dramatically improves income tax enforcement. Modern firms have a large number of employees and carry out complex production tasks, which requires the use of accurate business records. Because such records are widely used within the firm, any single employee can denounce collusive tax cheating between employees and the employer by revealing the true records to the government. We show that, if a firm is large enough, such whistleblowing threats will make tax enforcement successful even with low penalties and low audit rates. Embedding this agency model into the standard Allingham-Sandmo tax evasion model, we show that third-party reporting improves tax enforcement if the government disallows self-reported losses or audits such losses more stringently, which fits with actual tax policy practices. We also embed the agency model into a simple macroeconomic growth model where the size of firms grows with exogenous technological progress. In early stages of development, firms are small, tax rates are severely constrained by enforcement, and the size of government is too small. As firm size increases, the enforcement constraint is slackened, and government size is growing. In late stages of development, firm size is sufficiently large to make third-party tax enforcement completely effective and government size is socially optimal.

Zonder onderwerpscode: economie

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We study wealth inequality in childhood using Danish wealth records from three decades. While teenagers have some earnings, we estimate that transfers account for at least 50 percent of wealth at age 18, and much more so for the rich children. Inheritance from grandparents does not appear quantitatively important, but we do find evidence that children receive inter vivos transfers. While wealth holdings are small in childhood, they have strong predictive power for future wealth in adulthood. Asset holdings at age 18 are more informative than parental wealth in predicting wealth of children many years later when they are in their 40s. Hence, childhood wealth reveals significant heterogeneity in the intergenerational transmission of wealth, which is not simply captured by parental wealth alone. We investigate why this is the case and rule out that childhood wealth in itself can accumulate enough to explain later wealth inequality. Our evidence indicates that childhood wealth is a proxy for a broad set of circumstances related to intergenerational transmission and future wealth accumulation, including savings/investment behavior and additional transfers.

Zonder onderwerpscode: economie

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This paper estimates the welfare and distributional impact of two types of welfare reform in the 15 (pre-enlargement) member countries of the European Union. The reforms are revenue neutral and financed by an overall and uniform increase in marginal tax rates on earnings. The first reform distributes the additional tax revenue uniformly to everybody (traditional welfare) while the second reform distributes tax proceeds uniformly to workers only (in-work benefit). We build a simple model of labour supply encompassing responses to taxes and transfers along both the intensive and extensive margin. We then use EUROMOD to describe current welfare and tax systems in European Union countries and use calibrated labour supply elasticities along the intensive and extensive margins to analyze the effects of the two welfare reforms. We quantify the equity-efficiency trade-off for a range of elasticity parameters. In most countries, because of large existing welfare programmes with high phase-out rates, the uniform redistribution policy is undesirable unless the redistributive tastes of the government are extreme. The inwork benefit reform, on the other hand, is desirable in a very wide set of cases. We discuss the practical policy implications for European welfare policy.

Social Issues/Migration/Health

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