Volume 3, Issue 4

In the year 2000 Germany enacted a major tax reform involving significant cuts in corporate and personal tax rates and a controversial change in the system of dividend taxation. This paper discusses the effects of the business tax reform on the German economy. The analysis is based on a detailed general equilibrium model of the OECD economy which is designed to illustrate the domestic and international effects of national tax policies. The simulations indicate that the German business tax reform will raise domestic economic activity and welfare, although the welfare gain will accrue disproportionately to households with a high ratio of property income to total income.

Conventional models of equilibrium unemployment typically imply that proportional taxes on labor earnings are neutral with respect to unemployment as long as the tax does not affect the replacement rate provided by unemployment insurance, i.e. unemployment benefits relative to after-tax earnings. When home production is an option, the conventional results may no longer hold. This paper uses a search equilibrium model with home production to examine the employment and welfare implications of labor taxes. The employment effect of a rise in a proportional tax is found to be negative for sufficiently low replacement rates, whereas it is ambiguous for moderate and high replacement rates. Numerical calibrations of the model indicate that employment generally falls when labor taxes are raised.

The literature on unemployment has mostly focused on labor market issues while the impact of capital formation is largely neglected. Job creation is often thought to be a matter of encouraging more employment on a given capital stock. In contrast, this paper explicitly deals with the long-run consequences of institutional shocks on capital formation and employment. It is shown that the usual tradeoff between employment and wages disappears in the long run. In line with an appropriation model, the estimated values for the long-run elasticities of substitution between capital and labor for Germany and France are substantially greater than one.

In auctions a seller offers a commodity for sale and collects the revenue. In fair division games the object is collectively owned by the group of bidders who equally share the revenue. We run an experiment in which the participants face four types of allocation games (auctions and fair division game under two price rules, first- versus second-price rule). We collect entire bid functions rather than bids for single values and investigate price and efficiency of the different trading institutions. We find that the first-price auction is more efficient than the second-price auction, whereas economic rationality assuming heterogeneous bidders suggests the opposite. Furthermore, we study the structure of individual bid functions.

The classical gains-from-trade conjecture was finally given a thorough Arrow±Debreu proof in 1972. Since then, the proposition has been repeatedly challenged. Some of the challenges rest on grounds which in no respect violate Arrow±Debreu assumptions. Those challenges are therefore without foundation. The remaining challenges rest on the assertion that some of the Arrow±Debreu assumptions are unnatural and unnecessarily restrictive or on the imposition of artificial restrictions on the set of permissible compensatory transfers. We conclude that none of the challenges can be sustained.