The Effective Tax Rate and the Pretax Rate of Return

This paper presents new estimates of the taxes paid on nonfinancial corporate capital, on the pretax rate of return to capital, and on the effective tax rate. The basic time series show that both the pretax rate of return and the effective tax rate have varied substantially in the past quarter century. An explicit analysis indicates that, after adjusting for different aspects of the business cycle, pretax profitability was between one and 1.5 percentage points lower in the 1970's than in the 1960's. The rate of profitability in the 1960's was also about one-half of a percentage point greater than the profitability in the 7 years of the 1950's after the Korean war. Changes in productivity growth, in inflation, in relative unit labor costs, and in other variables are all associated with changes in profitability. None of these variables, however, can explain the differences in profitability between the 1950Ts, 1960's and 1970's. Looking at broad decade averages, the effective tax rate and the pretax rate of return move in opposite directions, higher pretax profits occurring when the tax rate is high. There thus appears to have been no tendency for pretax profits to vary in a way that offsets differences in effective tax rates.

Differential Income Taxation and Household Asset Allocation

This paper empirically investigates the effects of differential income taxation on households' portfolio choice and asset allocation applying a two-stage budgeting model of asset demand to German survey data. The model is structured into the discrete asset choice and the continuous asset choice, and the marginal income tax rate is simulated in a module of income taxation. Households that face relatively higher tax rates are found to have relatively greater demand for tax-privileged assets than households in the lower tax brackets. The higher the marginal tax rate the greater demand is for non-owner-occupied housing, for mortgage repayments, for building society deposits, for stocks, for insurances, and for consumer credits, whereas demand is lower for owner-occupied housing, bank deposits, and bonds

A True Test: Do Imf Programs Hurt the Poor

This paper uses a fixed-effects model to analyze the effect of IMF programs on poverty with data from 82 countries during 1985 to 2000. Two indicators of poverty, infant mortality rates and the Human Development Index (HDI), are utilized, and the effects of the IMF's concessionary and nonconcessionary programs are investigated, as well as economic and governance factors. The results show that the IMF's programs have no significant direct impact on poverty. Growth and good governance, however, both have significant impacts, lowering infant mortality and increasing the HDI. The Fund's concessionary programs increase the impact of growth on lowering infant mortality, while the nonconcessionary programs lower the impact of growth on the HDI. We also test for the impact of IMF programs on growth. Concessionary programs have a significant contemporaneous positive effect, while nonconcessionary programs have a significant lagged positive effect

Pension wealth and household savings Tests of robustness

SIGLELD:8611.674(41) / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

In vitro assessment of enzymatic phytate dephosphorylation during digestive process of different feeds and feed ingredients

International audienceIn vivo studies of the digestive process are long, expensive and difficult to rationalize, whereas in vitro systems may give more accessible insight into parts of this process. The purpose of this study was to show the ability of a three-step simulation of monogastric animals' digestive system to estimate phytate hydrolysis and how it is affected by feed composition. Several feed ingredients: wheat, maize, soybean meal and rapeseed meal and complete diets: a wheat-maize-soybean-mealbased diet, a maize-soybean-meal diet and a wheat-maize-rapeseed-meal diet were treated using an adaptation of a described in vitro digestion simulation system in the presence of increasing doses of phytase. A strong dependence of phytate hydrolysis on the feed ingredient used was obtained: phosphorus releases were 0.3, 0.8, 1.0 and 1.6 g/kg at 0 U/kg of phytase supplementation for maize, soybean meal, wheat and rapeseed meal respectively and 1.2, 2.9, 1.7 and 3.9 at 1000 U/kg of bacterial phytase. The efficacy of enzymatic dephosphorylation of phytate was found dependent on the ingredient, which can be partially explained by their initial content in myo-inositol phosphates. The in vitro simulation was proven a useful tool to assess enzymatic dephosphorylation of phytate under different conditions