Taxes and Income Distribution in Chile: Some Unpleasant Redistributive Arithmetic

This paper quantifies the direct impact of taxes on income distribution at the household level in Chile and estimates the distributional effect of several changes in the tax structure. We find that income distributions before and after taxes are very similar (Gini coefficients of 0.448 and 0.496, respectively). Moreover, radical modifications of the tax structure, such as raising the value added tax from 18 to 25% or substituting a 20% flat tax for the present progressive income tax affect the after-tax distribution only slightly. We present some arithmetic showing that the scope for direct income redistribution through progressivity of the tax system is rather limited. By contrast, for parameter values observed in Chile, and possibly in most developing countries, the targeting of expenditures and the level of the average tax rate are far more important determinants of income distribution after government transfers. Thus, a high-yield proportional tax can have a far bigger equalizing impact than a low-yield progressive tax. Moreover, a simple model shows that the optimal tax system is biased against progressive taxes and towards proportional taxes, with a bias that grows with the degree of inequality of pre-tax incomes.

Essays on macroeconomic volatility

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2003.Includes bibliographical references (p. 145-150).This thesis consists of three empirical essays on different aspects of macroeconomic volatility. The first essay provides evidence of a causal and economically important relation between financial development and macroeconomic volatility by looking at the effect of financial development in the volatility of sectors with different liquidity needs. The results show that sectors with high liquidity needs are relatively more volatile in financially underdeveloped countries. These sectoral effects of financial underdevelopment can significantly increase macroeconomic volatility, despite the fact that financial underdevelopment also induces countries to move away from sectors with high liquidity needs. The second essay explores the causes of the decline in U.S. manufacturing volatility during the last two decades. The essay presents and estimates a model that decomposes the changes in the volatilities of manufacturing sectors among the effects of output composition, aggregate shocks, sectoral shocks, and sectoral linkages. The results show that changes in the volatility of aggregate shocks and their impact across sectors account for the most of the decline in U.S. manufacturing volatility. A smaller role is played by changes in the volatility of sectoral shocks and in the intensity of sectoral linkages. The third essay analyzes both the sectoral effects of monetary policy and the role that monetary policy plays in the transmission of sectoral shocks. Our methodology is applied to the case of the U.S., finding considerable differences in the response of different sectors to monetary policy. The results also show that monetary policy is an important source of sectoral transfers: a shock to Equipment-and-Software Investment, naturally identified with the high-tech crises, induces a monetary policy response that generates a temporary boom in Residential Investment and Consumption of Durables, but which has almost no effect on the high-tech sector.by Claudio Enrique Raddatz Kiefer.Ph.D

A Note on Enforcement Spending and VAT Revenues

Tax compliance studies usually focus on the effect of enforce-ment spending on tax evasion. Reliable estimates are difficult to obtain because evasion data are often suspect. This note shows how tax revenues can be used instead of evasion data to estimate the impact of changes in enforcement spending. Applying our method to Chilean data, we find that $1 (USD) of additional enforcement spending increases VAT revenues by$31. Moreover, current levels of spending could increase by 40% and still be within sample values. Hence, a 10% increase in spending could reduce evasion from its current rate of 23% to 20%