What is Left to Residual Claimants? The Empirics of Income Reported by Entrepreneurs and Workers

Using Finnish panel data, we study how entrepreneurs differ from workers in education and income dynamics. We find that workers have higher median income in all educational groups. Without additional controls, entrepreneurs have higher average income with all but undergraduate level of education. However, random effects and matching models suggest that entrepreneurs have lower incomes. We also analyze those who changed careers. Those with higher level of education are more likely to switch from entrepreneurship to workers, while education does not explain, in a statistically significant level, switching from being worker to entrepreneurship.Entrepreneurs; Workers; Finnish labor market; Education

UNDERSTANDING THE EVOLUTION OF INEQUALITY DURING TRANSITION: THE OPTIMAL INCOME TAXATION

What explains the spectacular increases in inequality of disposable income in transitional economies of Central and Eastern Europe? There are at least two possible explanations. First, the pre-tax distribution of income became more unequal because of the shift to a market economy. Second, the degree of progressivity of the income tax system declined. But each of these factors is in turn determined by other structural changes associated with transition-notably, the decrease in public provision of key public goods, the decrease in non income tax revenue sources such as profits from public production, and perhaps a decline in society's inequality aversion. This paper develops a framework in which these different forces on inequality can be assessed. Using a simple two-type and two-sector optimal income tax model with endogenous wages, we first of all show that a decrease in the provision of public goods could indeed lead to increasing "inherent" inequality, in other words inequality in market incomes. It then deploys the Mirrlees model of optimal non- linear taxation to assess the relative impacts of this increase in inherent inequality, the decreasing sources of non income tax revenue, and possible declines in inequality aversion; to get a numerical feel for their possible impacts on inequality.International Development, Public Economics,

Comment on Education Returns of Wage Earners and Self-employed Workers

In a recent paper, García-Mainar and Montuenga-Gómez (2005) apply the generalized IV model of Hausman and Taylor to estimate education returns of wage earners and the self-employed in Portugal and in Spain. Our examination reveals several problems which relate to the validity and documentation of the instrumental variables, as well as the robustness of the results.Education; Entrepreneurship; Human capital; EGIV estimator

Non-Welfarist Optimal Taxation and Behavioral Public Economics

Research in behavioral economics has uncovered the widespread phenomenon of people making decisions against their own good intentions. In these situations, the government might want to intervene, indeed individuals might want the government to intervene, to induce behavior that is closer to what individuals wish they were doing. The analysis of such corrective interventions, through taxes and subsidies, might be called ”behavioral public economics.” However, such analysis, where the government has an objective function that is different from that of individuals, is not new in public economics. In these cases the government is said to be ”non-welfarist” in its objectives, and there is a long tradition of non-welfarist welfare economics, especially the analysis of optimal taxation and subsidy policy where the outcomes of individual behavior are evaluated using a preference function different from the one that generated the outcomes. The object of this paper is to first of all present a unified view of the non-welfarist optimal taxation literature and, secondly, to present behavioral public economics as a natural special case of this general framework.non-welfarism, optimal taxation, behavioral economics