IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/9179.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

How to Protect Future Generations Using Tax Base Restrictions

Author

Listed:
  • Antonio Rangel

Abstract

This paper studies constitutional restrictions on the tax base that protect future generations from expropriation and improve the optimality of investment in Intergenerational Public Goods (IPGs). The choice of the tax base matters because it affects how intergenerational (IG) spillovers are capitalized into assets that are owned by current generations, and thus the IG politics. We show that with an income tax base, present generations expropriate future generations and produce inefficiently low levels of IPGs. By contrast, with a land tax base, IG expropriation using debt is impossible, the level of investment in IPGs is higher and, for some types of IPGs, Pareto optimal.

Suggested Citation

  • Antonio Rangel, 2002. "How to Protect Future Generations Using Tax Base Restrictions," NBER Working Papers 9179, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:9179
    Note: PE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w9179.pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. repec:cup:apsrev:v:88:y:1994:i:04:p:811-828_09 is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Poterba, James M, 1994. "State Responses to Fiscal Crises: The Effects of Budgetary Institutions and Politics," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 102(4), pages 799-821, August.
    3. Altonji, Joseph G & Hayashi, Fumio & Kotlikoff, Laurence J, 1992. "Is the Extended Family Altruistically Linked? Direct Tests Using Micro Data," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 82(5), pages 1177-1198, December.
    4. Poterba, James M., 1995. "Capital budgets, borrowing rules, and state capital spending," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 56(2), pages 165-187, February.
    5. Boldrin, Michele & Montes Alonso, Ana, 1998. "Intergenerational transfer institutions public education and public pensions," UC3M Working papers. Economics 6148, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Departamento de Economía.
    6. Skinner, Jonathan, 1991. "Prospects for Agricultural Land Taxation in Developing Countries," World Bank Economic Review, World Bank Group, vol. 5(3), pages 493-511, September.
    7. Laurence J. Kotlikoff & Robert W. Rosenthal, 1993. "Some Inefficiency Implications Of Generational Politics And Exchange," Economics and Politics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 5(1), pages 27-42, March.
    8. Auerbach, Alan J. & Hines, James Jr., 2002. "Taxation and economic efficiency," Handbook of Public Economics,in: A. J. Auerbach & M. Feldstein (ed.), Handbook of Public Economics, edition 1, volume 3, chapter 21, pages 1347-1421 Elsevier.
    9. Altonji, Joseph G & Hayashi, Fumio & Kotlikoff, Laurence J, 1997. "Parental Altruism and Inter Vivos Transfers: Theory and Evidence," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 105(6), pages 1121-1166, December.
    10. Feldstein, Martin S, 1977. "The Surprising Incidence of a Tax on Pure Rent: A New Answer to an Old Question," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 85(2), pages 349-360, April.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Robert P. Inman, 2010. "States in Fiscal Distress," NBER Working Papers 16086, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Hilber, Christian A.L., 2010. "New housing supply and the dilution of social capital," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 67(3), pages 419-437, May.
    3. Marco Bassetto, 2009. "The Research Agenda: Marco Bassetto on the Quantitative Evaluation of Fiscal Policy Rules," EconomicDynamics Newsletter, Review of Economic Dynamics, vol. 10(2), April.
    4. Marco Bassetto, 2006. "Politics and Efficiency of Separating Capital and Ordinary Government Budgets," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 121(4), pages 1167-1210.
    5. Robert P. Inman, 2010. "States in fiscal distress," Regional Economic Development, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, issue Oct, pages 65-80.
    6. Marko Koethenbuerger & Panu Poutvaara, 2009. "Rent taxation and its intertemporal welfare effects in a small open economy," International Tax and Public Finance, Springer;International Institute of Public Finance, vol. 16(5), pages 697-709, October.
    7. Parry, Ian W.H., 2007. "Are the costs of reducing greenhouse gases from passenger vehicles negative?," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 62(2), pages 273-293, September.
    8. Gersbach, Hans, 2009. "Minority voting and public project provision," Economics - The Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal, Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW), vol. 3, pages 1-40.
    9. Springer, Job D. & Lusby, Aaron K. & Leatherman, John C. & Featherstone, Allen M., 2007. "Property Tax Lids and the Effect on Kansas," 2007 Annual Meeting, February 4-7, 2007, Mobile, Alabama 34887, Southern Agricultural Economics Association.
    10. Gersbach, Hans & Kleinschmidt, Tobias, 2009. "Power to youth: Designing democracy for long-term well-being," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 58(2), pages 158-172, September.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • H0 - Public Economics - - General
    • H2 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:9179. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: () or (Joanne Lustig). General contact details of provider: http://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.