IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/10138.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Regeneration, Labour Supply and the Welfare Costs of Taxes

Author

Listed:
  • Edgar Cudmore
  • John Whalley

Abstract

This paper sets out alternatives to the traditional model of labour supply used to analyse the welfare costs of income and/or sales taxes when preferences are defined over goods and leisure and the market wage yields the slope of the budget constraint. The innovation in our work is to assume that some or all of non market time is used to regenerate the productivity of labour through rest and relaxation. This model has no closed form solution, but we can work with the first order conditions numerically for specific functional forms using non linear solution software. We generate a number of alternative parameterizations of this model through a series of calibrations to the same synthetic base case data set. Across the resulting parameterizations the welfare costs of taxes vary substantially (by a factor of twenty fold in some counterfactual analyses), even though they all involve calibration to the same base case data and labour supply elasticity. These results thus suggest that a small and seemingly plausible departure from a standard model (even if not in closed form) that has dominated the economic literature for many years can yield substantial change for perspectives on policy interventions.

Suggested Citation

  • Edgar Cudmore & John Whalley, 2003. "Regeneration, Labour Supply and the Welfare Costs of Taxes," NBER Working Papers 10138, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:10138
    Note: PE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w10138.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Richard Blundell & Alan Duncan & Costas Meghir, 1998. "Estimating Labor Supply Responses Using Tax Reforms," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 66(4), pages 827-862, July.
    2. Blundell, Richard & Macurdy, Thomas, 1999. "Labor supply: A review of alternative approaches," Handbook of Labor Economics, in: O. Ashenfelter & D. Card (ed.), Handbook of Labor Economics, edition 1, volume 3, chapter 27, pages 1559-1695, Elsevier.
    3. Banks, James & Blundell, Richard & Lewbel, Arthur, 1996. "Tax Reform and Welfare Measurement: Do We Need Demand System Estimation?," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 106(438), pages 1227-1241, September.
    4. Shoven,John B. & Whalley,John, 1992. "Applying General Equilibrium," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521266550, November.
    5. John C. Ham & Kevin T. Reilly, 2002. "Testing Intertemporal Substitution, Implicit Contracts, and Hours Restriction Models of the Labor Market Using Micro Data," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 92(4), pages 905-927, September.
    6. Biddle, Jeff E & Hamermesh, Daniel S, 1990. "Sleep and the Allocation of Time," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 98(5), pages 922-943, October.
    7. John Creedy (ed.), 1999. "Economic Welfare: Concepts and Measurement," Books, Edward Elgar Publishing, volume 0, number 1802.
    8. Jonas D. M. Fisher, 2001. "A real explanation for heterogeneous investment dynamics," Working Paper Series WP-01-14, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
    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. Jonas D. M. Fisher, 2007. "Why Does Household Investment Lead Business Investment over the Business Cycle?," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 115(1), pages 141-168.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Beffy, Magali & Blundell, Richard & Bozio, Antoine & Laroque, Guy & Tô, Maxime, 2019. "Labour supply and taxation with restricted choices," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 211(1), pages 16-46.
    2. Abe, Yukiko & Tamada, Keiko, 2010. "Regional patterns of employment changes of less-educated men in Japan: 1990-2007," Japan and the World Economy, Elsevier, vol. 22(2), pages 69-79, March.
    3. Thomas F. Crossley & Sung-Hee Jeon, 2007. "Joint Taxation and the Labour Supply of Married Women: Evidence from the Canadian Tax Reform of 1988," Fiscal Studies, Institute for Fiscal Studies, vol. 28(3), pages 343-365, September.
    4. Kuroda, Sachiko & Yamamoto, Isamu, 2008. "Estimating Frisch labor supply elasticity in Japan," Journal of the Japanese and International Economies, Elsevier, vol. 22(4), pages 566-585, December.
    5. Ganghua Mei & Lei Yue, 2022. "Labor supply and time use: evidence from cohabiting women in the United States," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 54(44), pages 5133-5158, September.
    6. Richard Blundell & Mike Brewer & Marco Francesconi, 2008. "Job Changes and Hours Changes: Understanding the Path of Labor Supply Adjustment," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 26(3), pages 421-453, July.
    7. Philip Trostel & Ian Walker, 2006. "Education and Work," Education Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 14(4), pages 377-399.
    8. Richard Blundell & Monica Costa Dias & Costas Meghir & Jonathan Shaw, 2016. "Female Labor Supply, Human Capital, and Welfare Reform," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 84, pages 1705-1753, September.
    9. Bargain, Olivier B. & Orsini, Kristian & Peichl, Andreas, 2011. "Labor Supply Elasticities in Europe and the US," IZA Discussion Papers 5820, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    10. Attanasio, Orazio & Low, Hamish & Sánchez-Marcos, Virginia & Levell, Peter, 2015. "Aggregating Elasticities: Intensive and Extensive Margins of Female Labour Supply," CEPR Discussion Papers 10732, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    11. Bingley Paul & Walker Ian & Zhu Yu, 2005. "Education, Work and Wages in the UK," German Economic Review, De Gruyter, vol. 6(3), pages 395-414, August.
    12. Olivier Bargain & Kristian Orsini & Andreas Peichl, 2014. "Comparing Labor Supply Elasticities in Europe and the United States: New Results," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 49(3), pages 723-838.
    13. Clément Carbonnier, 2008. "Spouse labor supply: fiscal incentive and income effect,evidence from French fully joint income tax system," THEMA Working Papers 2008-20, THEMA (THéorie Economique, Modélisation et Applications), Université de Cergy-Pontoise.
    14. Cinthya Caamal Olvera., 2007. "Oferta Laboral en México: un enfoque de variables instrumentales," Ensayos Revista de Economia, Universidad Autonoma de Nuevo Leon, Facultad de Economia, vol. 0(1), pages 115-154, May.
    15. Rolf Aaberge & Ugo Colombino, 2014. "Labour Supply Models," Contributions to Economic Analysis, in: Handbook of Microsimulation Modelling, volume 127, pages 167-221, Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
    16. Aarbu, Karl O. & Thoresen, Thor O., 2001. "Income Responses to Tax Changes--Evidence From the Norwegian Tax Reform," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association;National Tax Journal, vol. 54(2), pages 319-338, June.
    17. Volker Grossmann, 2003. "A Note on Redistributive Taxation, Labor Supply, and National Income," International Journal of Business and Economics, School of Management Development, Feng Chia University, Taichung, Taiwan, vol. 2(1), pages 39-48, April.
    18. Joseph G. Altonji & Anthony A. Smith Jr. & Ivan Vidangos, 2013. "Modeling Earnings Dynamics," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 81(4), pages 1395-1454, July.
    19. Lusi Liao & Sasiwimon Warunsiri Paweenawat, 2021. "The inversion of married women's labour supply and wage: Evidence from Thailand," Asian-Pacific Economic Literature, The Crawford School, The Australian National University, vol. 35(1), pages 82-98, May.
    20. Richard Blundell & Pierre-Andre Chiappori & Thierry Magnac & Costas Meghir, 2007. "Collective Labour Supply: Heterogeneity and Non-Participation," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 74(2), pages 417-445.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • J2 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor
    • 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:10138. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    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 bibliographic 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.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

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

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.