دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی میلیونرها و یا سازندگان شغل: تغییرات در رشد اشتغال به هنگام ثروتمند شدن - Sage 2017

Abstract

We provide empirical evidence on the consequences of relatively higher tax burdens on the rich for aggregate employment growth using a newly constructed time series for 1947 through 2011 derived from the US Statistics of Income. In response to shifts in the relative federal tax burden toward the rich, we find statistically significant positive effects on employment growth in the short run and some evidence of negative effects on employment growth in the long run. Among our robustness checks, we use the Romer and Romer narrative record analysis to restrict our sample to a period of exclusively exogenous tax changes. The results hold in the restricted sample and are also consistent across alternative specifications and estimation methods, including unrestricted and Bayesian vector autoregressive.

Conclusion

The impact on employment growth from increasing taxes on the rich has been empirically investigated using US time-series data from the IRS SOI. Positive and statistically significant short-run effects, negative and statistically significant long-run effects, and positive cumulative effects have been identified. An exhaustive number of alternative specifications and estimation methods have been used that produce consistent findings. For one of the robustness checks, the sample is restricted to a period of purely exogenous tax changes based on the Romer and Romer (2010) narrative record analysis. The results from the restricted exogenous sample point to even larger effects. This finding is consistent with that of Romer and Romer where estimated tax effects obtained using the restricted measure of exogenous tax changes are larger than those found using broader measures of tax changes.

One of the limitations of this study, similar to empirical analyses of government spending multipliers (e.g., Ramey 2011), is that we do not structurally identify the transmission mechanisms whereby tax burdens affect employment growth. Our regressions on aggregate consumption and investment suggest that some of the positive effects observed in the short run may be driven by redistribution effects, while adverse impacts on investment, innovation, and entrepreneurship may be driving the negative long-run effects. Although the short- and long-run impacts have been identified in this study, the question of what specifically drives these results is open for future research.