Search

This paper examines the instability property of balanced-budget taxation on factor income and consumption in a two-sector real business cycle model with home production. We show that the presence of home production, which is a nontaxed sector, reinforces the intratemporal and intertemporal substitution effects of balanced-budget rules. As a result, it strengthens the destabilization effect of factor income taxes and weakens the stabilization effect of consumption taxes. Moreover, our calibration shows that the number of OECD countries’ tax-rate combinations that fall into the instability region rises when home goods account for a larger share of aggregate consumption, and hence persistent cycles can easily occur following a fundamental shock or a sunspot shock.

In a closed economy, a balanced-budget fiscal policy rule with endogenous income tax rates can generate aggregate instability due to self-fulfilling expectations (e.g., Schmitt-Grohe and Uribe, 1997 ). This paper shows, both analytically and numerically, that beliefs-driven aggregate instability associated with such a balanced-budget rule is less of a problem in a small open economy integrated in the world asset and goods markets. This is because cross-border capital flows and endogenous international price adjustments produce income effects that reduce the likelihood of sunspot equilibria. From a policy perspective, our results relieve possible concerns that balanced-budget rules and reliance on income taxes to achieve budget objective could have destabilizing effects on the economy.

This paper generalizes the theoretical model of Aghion et al. (2012) to re-examine the cyclicality of R&D investment with credit constraint and linear production with different innovation capabilities. In contrast to their procyclical conclusion, we show that the R&D investment can be acyclical, procyclical, or countercyclical depending on the innovation capability, the tightness of credit constraint and the level of an entrepreneur‘s wealth.

In a small open economy facing a perfect world capital market, this paper shows that if the government follows a balanced-budget fiscal policy based on endogenous consumption tax rates, then the steady state is saddle-path stable and hence beliefs-driven aggregate instability can be ruled out. This result is in contrast to those obtained in some closed economy models, and it suggests that unrestricted world capital mobility can help stabilize the economy under the balanced-budget fiscal policy based on consumption taxation.

In this paper, we examine the effects of constant-rate factor taxation on macroeconomic stability in the Woodford (1986) model. Our focus is on how the degree of factor substitution, as measured by the elasticity of factor substitution (EOS) in production, affects different balanced-budget tax rules. Analytically, we show that indeterminacy can occur under capital income taxation only when the EOS is very low, whereas indeterminacy under labor income taxation is not subject to the EOS restriction. This finding is robust when we tax all of the factor incomes with equal rates. Thus, in terms of macroeconomic stability, taxing capital income is preferred to taxing labor income.

This paper examines the relation between aggregate elasticity of substitution (AES) and capital accumulation (the AES-K relation) in a general multi-sector Solow growth model with all CES production technologies. There are two intermediate goods produced by capital and labor, while the final good is produced by combining the two intermediate goods. When capital is sector-specific, then it is found that a positive AES-K relation emerges ony if the elasticity of substitution (ES) between capital and labor is of the same sign as the ES between the inter-mediate goods, but with the latter having a larger magnitude as required by the restriction of capital-skill complementarity. We also introduce the concepts of "global" versus "local" AES-capital relation and highlight that the AES findings of the existing literature are local ones. The general conclusion of our analysis is that capital mobility is an important factor for the likelihood of a positive AES-K relation.

We show that, with endogenous investment, virtually all monetary policy rules that set a nominal interest rate in response solely to expected future inflation induce real indeterminacy in models with (i) staggered prices, (ii) staggered prices and staggered wages, and (iii) staggered prices, staggered wages, and firm-specific capital. In (i), policy's response to current output can help significantly in ensuring determinacy with an infinite labor supply elasticity, but little with empirically plausible labor supply elasticity. In (ii), responding to output always helps a great deal, though under low price stickiness and without capital adjustment cost it may call for a moderate response to output in order to ensure determinacy for a wide range of response to inflation. In (iii), even a tiny response to output can always render equilibrium determinate for a wide range of response to inflation.