Property Rights and Long-Run Capital

The fact that some proprietary capital gradually falls into the public domain (e.g. patents) or is taxed to fund productive public spending (e.g. public infrastructures and the institutional framework) inefficiently decreases capital accumulation, impacting households' consumption. Specifically, for a neoclassical infinitely-lived agents economy with constant returns to scale the planner's steady state consumption is 4.6%-9.1% higher than the market one —for standard empirically supported parameters. For a similarly parametrised overlapping generations economy it is around 10.5%. A tax and subsidy balanced policy able to decentralise the planner's steady consists of (i) subsidising the rental rate of private capital by an amount equal to its depreciation by (ii) taxing households' net position between, on the one hand, firm and depreciated capital ownership and, on the other, borrowing against future dividends and its resale value. From standard functions and parameterisations of the OG setup it follows that the savings rate decentralising the planner's steady state is close to 61.5% —of which ⅓ in loans to firms and ⅔ in real monetary balances and assets ownership net of borrowing against the latter— and that the tax rate on household net debt is smaller the bigger are monetary real balances and debt.