Volume 242, Issue 5-6 - Special Issue: Redistribution in a Globalized World; Guest Editors: David R. Agrawal and Dirk Foremny

Due to technological change, the opening of borders, and increased economic integration, the financial costs of relocating businesses and factors of production, moving residences, changing jobs, and transporting goods and services across borders pose new challenges for countries and subnational governments seeking to implement redistributive policies. This increasing mobility across borders implies that redistributive policies may amplify interjurisdictional fiscal externalities. In this article, we selectively review the literature relating to redistributive policy in an open economy setting. We then consider some of the implications of globalization for policy design, both within federal systems and across countries. Although globalization poses new challenges for fiscal systems, it does not necessarily imply that redistributive policy becomes untenable and possibly enhances the need for redistribution.

Unlike many other countries, the United States does not have a comprehensive federal transfer scheme for explicit fiscal equalization but rather employs an array of categorical and block grants, some of which are formula-based while others are project-driven. However, the allocation of many of these grants has equalization effects resulting in the narrowing of fiscal disparities among jurisdictions. Few studies have attempted to quantify the extent of equalization achieved with federal and state grants in a manner that would allow comparisons across states and over time. In this study, we set out to measure the extent of equalization across local governments in the United States that is implicit in the federal grants system and more explicit in the grants implemented by the individual states. Rather than focusing on specific types of local services, we look at the evolution of per capita resources available to all types of local governments combined.

The New Market Tax Credit (NMTC) is a place-based policy in the United States which annually incentivizes billions in direct investments towards selected impoverished communities. I document how project characteristics and NMTC claimants have changed over the lifetime of the policy. The share of real estate projects has declined by over 30 percentage points and the share of projects in metropolitan areas has declined by over 20 percentage points. Although available to both corporate and individuals tax filers, the NMTC is primarily claimed by corporate filers. NMTC claimants have higher levels of income and assets than the average taxpayer. By 2018, the NMTC is over 45% of all general business credits for NMTC claimants. I also quantify how economic conditions are correlated with the probability and amount of NMTC investment a tract receives. Cross-sectional comparisons within states indicate tracts with greater poverty rates are correlated with a higher likelihood of receiving NMTC investment and receiving more investment. However, comparisons within tracts across time are inconclusive.

While taxes on wealth for a long time played only a marginal role in the public finance and taxation literature, the increase of wealth inequality and concentration in many EU countries has spurred new interest in wealth taxation. At the same time, recurrent net wealth taxes have almost completely disappeared in Europe, inter alia due to fears of asset and taxpayer migration. The paper provides estimates of the revenue that could be raised from an EU-wide net wealth tax enabling the containment of migration responses, using data from the Household, Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS). To account for differential non-response, we augment the HFCS with data from the Forbes rich list as well as national rich lists and replace the top tail of the wealth distribution according to the HFCS by an estimated Pareto distributed top tail. To account for under-reporting we scale aggregate financial assets in the HFCS to match their counterparts outlined in the National Accounts. We estimate that a moderately progressive net wealth tax levied at a rate of 1% on net wealth between € 1 and € 5 million, and 1.5% on wealth above € 5 million, could raise between € 165 and € 177 billion after accounting for avoidance and evasion responses. Such an EU harmonized net wealth tax would affect only a small fraction of households, ranging between 0.41% in Latvia and 8.65% in Belgium.

We present and analyze the dataset on the international distribution of industrial robots by country, industry, and application provided by the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) since 1993. After describing the IFR we point out specificities and limitations of its dataset. We explain the process of data collection, develop a correspondence table between the IFR industry classification and the ISIC rev. 4 industry classification, and clarify the applied compliance rules. We further compute average implicit depreciation rates inherent to the robot stocks in the IFR dataset in the range of 4–7% per year between 1993 and 2019. We also find that the share of industrial robots that are not classified to any industry or application has sharply declined since 2005.

Public debates and current research on “digitalization” suggest that digital technologies could profoundly transform the world of work. While broad claims are common in these debates, empirical evidence remains scarce. This calls for reliable data for empirical research and evidence-based policymaking. We implemented a data module in the Socio-Economic Panel to gather information on digitalization in three domains: artificial intelligence (AI), platform work, and digitalized workplace. This paper describes the existing approaches to measure technological exposure, the challenges in operationalization of digital transformation in a household survey, the implemented questionnaire items, and the research potential of this new data.

Since 2016 the Journal of Economics and Statistics has the Data Observer section with descriptions of data that can be used in empirical research in economics and in the social sciences in general. This note gives a short overview of the first 50 contributions to the series published until 2022.