IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/20437.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Tax News: The Response of Household Spending to Changes in Expected Taxes

Author

Listed:
  • Lorenz Kueng

Abstract

Although theoretical models of household behavior often emphasize fiscal foresight, empirical studies of household consumption have yet to document the role of news about tax changes. Using novel high-frequency bond data, I develop a model of the term structure of municipal yield spreads as a function of future top income tax rates and a risk premium. Testing the model using the presidential elections of 1992 and 2000 as two quasi-natural experiments shows that financial markets forecast future tax rates remarkably well in both the short and long run. Combining these market-based tax expectations with data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, I find that spending of higher-income households increases by close to 1% in response to news of a 1% increase in expected after-tax lifetime (permanent) income. These findings imply that by ignoring anticipation effects, previous estimates of the total effect of a tax change could be substantially biased.

Suggested Citation

  • Lorenz Kueng, 2014. "Tax News: The Response of Household Spending to Changes in Expected Taxes," NBER Working Papers 20437, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:20437
    Note: AP EFG PE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w20437.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Edward N. Wolff, 2007. "Recent Trends in Household Wealth in the United States: Rising Debt and the Middle-Class Squeeze," Economics Working Paper Archive wp_502, Levy Economics Institute.
    2. Stefano Giglio, 2011. "Credit default swap spreads and systemic financial risk," Proceedings 1122, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
    3. Slemrod, Joel & Greimel, Timothy, 1999. "Did Steve Forbes scare the US municipal bond market?," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 74(1), pages 81-96, October.
    4. Ayers, Benjamin C & Cloyd, C Bryan & Robinson, John R, 2005. ""Read My Lips . . .": Does the Tax Rhetoric of Presidential Candidates Affect Security Prices?," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 48(1), pages 125-148, April.
    5. Nicholas S. Souleles & Jonathan A. Parker & David S. Johnson, 2006. "Household Expenditure and the Income Tax Rebates of 2001," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 96(5), pages 1589-1610, December.
    6. Hausman, Jerry A & Poterba, James M, 1987. "Household Behavior and the Tax Reform Act of 1986," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 1(1), pages 101-119, Summer.
    7. Costas Meghir & Luigi Pistaferri, 2004. "Income Variance Dynamics and Heterogeneity," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 72(1), pages 1-32, January.
    8. repec:bla:jfinan:v:43:y:1988:i:4:p:913-31 is not listed on IDEAS
    9. Peter Fortune, 1996. "Do municipal bond yields forecast tax policy?," New England Economic Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, issue Sep, pages 29-48.
    10. Abowd, John M & Card, David, 1989. "On the Covariance Structure of Earnings and Hours Changes," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 57(2), pages 411-445, March.
    11. James M. Poterba, 1986. "Explaining the Yield Spread between Taxable and Tax-exempt Bonds: The Role of Expected Tax Policy," NBER Chapters, in: Studies in State and Local Public Finance, pages 5-52, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    12. Edward N. Wolff, 2010. "Recent Trends in Household Wealth in the United States-- Rising Debt and the Middle-Class Squeeze--An Update to 2007," Economics Working Paper Archive wp_589, Levy Economics Institute.
    13. Nicholas S. Souleles, 1999. "The Response of Household Consumption to Income Tax Refunds," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 89(4), pages 947-958, September.
    14. Alan J. Auerbach & Joel Slemrod, 1997. "The Economic Effects of the Tax Reform Act of 1986," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 35(2), pages 589-632, June.
    15. MaCurdy, Thomas E., 1982. "The use of time series processes to model the error structure of earnings in a longitudinal data analysis," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 18(1), pages 83-114, January.
    16. N. Gregory Mankiw & James M. Poterba, 1996. "Stock Market Yields and the Pricing of Municipal Bonds," NBER Working Papers 5607, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    17. Green, Richard C, 1993. "A Simple Model of the Taxable and Tax-Exempt Yield Curves," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 6(2), pages 233-264.
    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. Rabah Arezki & Valerie A. Ramey & Liugang Sheng, 2017. "News Shocks in Open Economies: Evidence from Giant Oil Discoveries," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 132(1), pages 103-155.
    2. Daniel Garrett & Andrey Ordin & James W Roberts & Juan Carlos Suárez Serrato, 2023. "Tax Advantages and Imperfect Competition in Auctions for Municipal Bonds," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 90(2), pages 815-851.
    3. Miura, Ken & Sakurai, Takeshi, 2021. "News from the Sky: An Empirical Test of Forward-Looking Behavior Among Zambian Farmers," 2021 Conference, August 17-31, 2021, Virtual 315161, International Association of Agricultural Economists.
    4. Mathieu Pedemonte, 2020. "Fireside Chats: Communication and Consumers’ Expectations in the Great Depression," Working Papers 20-30, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.

    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. Reis, Ricardo, 2006. "Inattentive consumers," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 53(8), pages 1761-1800, November.
    2. Greg Kaplan & Giovanni L. Violante & Justin Weidner, 2014. "The Wealthy Hand-to-Mouth," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 48(1 (Spring), pages 77-153.
    3. Wang, Chong & Wang, Neng & Yang, Jinqiang, 2016. "Optimal consumption and savings with stochastic income and recursive utility," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 165(C), pages 292-331.
    4. Jeanne Commault, 2016. "How Does Nondurable Consumption Respond To Transitory Income Shocks? Reconciling Natural Experiments and Structural Estimations," Working Papers hal-01328904, HAL.
    5. Charles Grant & Christos Koulovatianos & Alexander Michaelides & Mario Padula, 2010. "Evidence on the Insurance Effect of Redistributive Taxation," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 92(4), pages 965-973, November.
    6. Fatih Guvenen & Burhanettin Kuruscu, 2010. "A Quantitative Analysis of the Evolution of the US Wage Distribution, 1970–2000," NBER Chapters, in: NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2009, Volume 24, pages 227-276, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    7. Emma Tominey, 2010. "The Timing of Parental Income and Child Outcomes: The Role of Permanent and Transitory Shocks," CEE Discussion Papers 0120, Centre for the Economics of Education, LSE.
    8. Tony Smith & M. Fatih Guvenen, 2007. "Inferring Labor Income Risk from Economic Choices: An Indirect Inference Approach," 2007 Meeting Papers 1024, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    9. Alvarez, Javier & Arellano, Manuel, 2022. "Robust likelihood estimation of dynamic panel data models," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 226(1), pages 21-61.
    10. Arpita Chatterjee & James Morley & Aarti Singh, 2021. "Estimating household consumption insurance," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 36(5), pages 628-635, August.
    11. repec:spo:wpecon:info:hdl:2441/6ggbvnr6munghes9od0s108ro is not listed on IDEAS
    12. Masakatsu Okubo, 2015. "Earnings Dynamics and Profile Heterogeneity: Estimates from Japanese Panel Data," The Japanese Economic Review, Japanese Economic Association, vol. 66(1), pages 112-146, March.
    13. Dmytro Hryshko, 2012. "Labor income profiles are not heterogeneous: Evidence from income growth rates," Quantitative Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 3(2), pages 177-209, July.
    14. Jeremy Lise & Costas Meghir & Jean-Marc Robin, 2016. "Matching, Sorting and Wages," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 19, pages 63-87, January.
    15. Thomas Luke Spreen & Ed Gerrish, 2022. "Taxes and tax‐exempt bonds: A literature review," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 36(4), pages 767-808, September.
    16. Jeffrey R. Campbell & Zvi Hercowitz, 2019. "Liquidity Constraints of the Middle Class," American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, American Economic Association, vol. 11(3), pages 130-155, August.
    17. Jeremy Lise & Costas Meghir & Jean-Marc Robin, 2013. "Mismatch, sorting and wage dynamics," IFS Working Papers W13/16, Institute for Fiscal Studies.
    18. Jenkins, Stephen P., 2011. "Has the Instability of Personal Incomes been Increasing?," National Institute Economic Review, National Institute of Economic and Social Research, vol. 218, pages 33-43, October.
    19. Maarten Janssen & Sandro Shelegia, 2012. "Consumer Search and Vertical Relations: The Triple Marginalization Problem," Vienna Economics Papers 1206, University of Vienna, Department of Economics.
    20. L. Hospido, 2012. "Modelling heterogeneity and dynamics in the volatility of individual wages," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 27(3), pages 386-414, April.
    21. Otto Kässi, 2014. "Earnings dynamics of men and women in Finland: permanent inequality versus earnings instability," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 46(2), pages 451-477, March.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • E21 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Consumption; Saving; Wealth
    • E62 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook - - - Fiscal Policy; Modern Monetary Theory
    • G12 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Asset Pricing; Trading Volume; Bond Interest Rates
    • H31 - Public Economics - - Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents - - - Household
    • H74 - Public Economics - - State and Local Government; Intergovernmental Relations - - - State and Local Borrowing

    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:20437. 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.