This paper presents development of an endogenously growing finite horizons model with public capital, and investigates macroeconomic effects of fiscal policy and a change in life expectancy. Specifically regarding novel results, a growth-maximizing income tax rate exists that is less than the elasticity of public capital to output. In addition, in the model with income tax financing, there might exist an inverted-U-shaped relationship between life expectancy and growth, which is consistent with some empirical evidence. In this paper, we elucidate the interaction among public capital accumulation, taxes, growth, welfare and life expectancy.

This paper surveys the tax policy implications in various endogenous growth models. The focus is on the long-run growth effects of income, consumption, and investment taxation in models whose engine of growth is the accumulation of human capital, technological innovation, and/or public infrastructure. The results depend on model specifications. This paper also reviews quantitative results from cross-country regressions and simulations, and indicates some statistical and methodological problems to which they are subject. Tax policy implications in endogenous growth models both with tax policy endogenously determined by a political process and with international capital mobility are also discussed.

This paper examines the effects of taxation of human capital, physical capital and foreign assets in a multi-sector model of endogenous growth. It is shown that in general the growth rate is reduced by taxes on capital and labor (human capital) income. When the government faces no borrowing constraints and is able to commit to a given set of present and future taxes, it is shown that the optimal tax plan involves high taxation of both capital and labor in the short run. This allows the government to accumulate sufficient assets to finance spending without any recourse to distortionary taxation in the long run. When restrictions to government borrowing and lending are imposed, the model implies that human and physical capital should be taxed similarly.

The paper presents and estimates an endogenous growth model with public capital. In contrast, however, to recent studies on economic growth and policy, we allow for capital market borrowing by the government. Since the behavior by the government (tax rates, spending and borrowing) does not follow optimizing rules, we introduce regimes (rules) which define the behavior of the government. In strict regimes government borrowing is used for public investment. In less strict regimes it can also be used for debt service and public investment. In our model variants government deficit does not necessarily entail a lower growth rate of the economy but the growth defects are different according to which rules are adopted. Moreover, in our context the growth maximizing income tax rate is different from zero. The model, contingent on the regime prevailing, can exhibit multiple equilibria and local and global indeterminacy. For two relevant regimes which roughly correspond to the cases of the U.S. and Germany the model is estimated by employing time series data from 1952 to 1990. The estimation strategy we propose is similar to the strategy employed to estimate Real Business Cycle (RBC) models. In the present case, as in RBC studies, the model to be estimated is nonlinear in parameters. We employ a GMM estimation using Newey and West (1987) weighting matrices. The estimated structural parameters for the two economies fall into a reasonable range. The results permit us to interpret the contribution of public capital and government borrowing to economic growth and the different growth experiences of the American and German economies in the post-war period. Moreover, our methodology allows us to also explore the sustainability of public debt for the U.S. as well as Germany.

'This is one of those rare technical books which has an importance outside its own field' The Daily Telegraph. 'One of the most stimulating post-war books on public finance' The Guardian. Part 1 examines the issue of Expenditure Tax in principle and includes chapters on the following: * Income, Expenditure and Taxable Capacity * The Concept of Income in Economic Theory * Taxation and Savings * Taxation and risk-bearing * Taxation and the Incentive to Work * Company Taxation * Taxation and Economic Progress Part 2 examines the issue of Expenditure Tax in practice, asking whether personal expenditure tax is practicable and putting forward a proposal for Surtax Reform.

The long-awaited second edition of an important textbook on economic growth—a major revision incorporating the most recent work on the subject. This graduate level text on economic growth surveys neoclassical and more recent growth theories, stressing their empirical implications and the relation of theory to data and evidence. The authors have undertaken a major revision for the long-awaited second edition of this widely used text, the first modern textbook devoted to growth theory. The book has been expanded in many areas and incorporates the latest research. After an introductory discussion of economic growth, the book examines neoclassical growth theories, from Solow-Swan in the 1950s and Cass-Koopmans in the 1960s to more recent refinements; this is followed by a discussion of extensions to the model, with expanded treatment in this edition of heterogenity of households. The book then turns to endogenous growth theory, discussing, among other topics, models of endogenous technological progress (with an expanded discussion in this edition of the role of outside competition in the growth process), technological diffusion, and an endogenous determination of labor supply and population. The authors then explain the essentials of growth accounting and apply this framework to endogenous growth models. The final chapters cover empirical analysis of regions and empirical evidence on economic growth for a broad panel of countries from 1960 to 2000. The updated treatment of cross-country growth regressions for this edition uses the new Summers-Heston data set on world income distribution compiled through 2000.

This book analyzes the dynamic macroeconomic effects of public capital in industrialized countries. The issue of whether public capital is productive has received a great deal of recent attention. Yet, existing empirical analyses have been limited to a small set of countries. This book presents a new database that provides internationally comparable capital stock estimates for 22 OECD countries for the 1960-2001 period. Building on this database, the book estimates the dynamic effects of public capital using a variety of econometric methods. The results suggest that public capital is productive in OECD countries on average. The theoretical analysis based on a dynamic general equilibrium model shows that the effects of public capital depend crucially on the way the government chooses to finance additional spending.

Optimal tax design attempts to resolve a well-known trade-off: namely, that high taxes are bad insofar as they discourage people from working, but good to the degree that, by redistributing wealth, they help insure people against productivity shocks. Until recently, however, economic research on this question either ignored people's uncertainty about their future productivities or imposed strong and unrealistic functional form restrictions on taxes. In response to these problems, the new dynamic public finance was developed to study the design of optimal taxes given only minimal restrictions on the set of possible tax instruments, and on the nature of shocks affecting people in the economy. In this book, Narayana Kocherlakota surveys and discusses this exciting new approach to public finance. An important book for advanced PhD courses in public finance and macroeconomics, The New Dynamic Public Finance provides a formal connection between the problem of dynamic optimal taxation and dynamic principal-agent contracting theory. This connection means that the properties of solutions to principal-agent problems can be used to determine the properties of optimal tax systems. The book shows that such optimal tax systems necessarily involve asset income taxes, which may depend in sophisticated ways on current and past labor incomes. It also addresses the implications of this new approach for qualitative properties of optimal monetary policy, optimal government debt policy, and optimal bequest taxes. In addition, the book describes computational methods for approximate calculation of optimal taxes, and discusses possible paths for future research.