The paper reviews the literature on these tax incentives, with special focus on long-term saving, housing, and household liabilities. The paper addresses several areas of policy intervention: (1) the interest rate effect on personal saving; (2) the effect of tax incentives on long-term mandatory saving programs; (3) government programs that target saving for home purchase; (4) government programs that target health and saving for education; (5) the effect of tax incentives to borrow, rather than to save. For each of these five important issues, the paper provides empirical evidence on the main characteristics of government programs, with a special focus on middle-income countries. It also addresses a number of issues that should be of interest to policy-makers. First of all, on which grounds government policy should target some assets rather than others. Second, if tax-sheltered assets and liabilities lead to substitution away from more heavily taxed savings instruments or if they affect the overall level of saving. And finally, if there is any lesson that can be drawn from the experience of developed countries for the design of saving and borrowing incentives in middle-income countries.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Centre for Studies in Economics and Finance (CSEF), University of Salerno, Italy in its series CSEF Working Papers with number
83.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
B. Douglas Bernheim, 1999.
"Taxation and Saving,"
NBER Working Papers
7061, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Other versions:
B. Douglas Bernheim, 1999.
"Taxation and Saving,"
Working Papers
99007, Stanford University, Department of Economics.
[Downloadable!]
Bernheim, B. Douglas, 2002.
"Taxation and saving,"
Handbook of Public Economics,
in: A. J. Auerbach & M. Feldstein (ed.), Handbook of Public Economics, edition 1, volume 3, chapter 18, pages 1173-1249
Elsevier.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Simeon Djankov & Rafael La Porta & Florencio Lopez-de-Silane & Andrei Shleifer, 2002.
"Courts: the Lex Mundi Project,"
NBER Working Papers
8890, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Other versions:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)
Did you know? You can import bibliographic info in various formats into you bibliographic tool, or just into your word processor. See under "publisher info" on each abstract page.