Tax And Transfer Policy Using Behavioural Microsimulation Modelling

Combining theoretical and practical aspects of policy analysis, this book evaluates actual and proposed policy reforms to income tax and transfer systems, using a behavioural tax microsimulation model. It highlights how these models allow for the full details of tax systems and the considerable population heterogeneity that is found in practice. John Creedy and Penny Mok look at how such models can be used to obtain summary measures that are relevant in tax debates. These include elasticities of labour supply and measures of the welfare effects of tax changes, in terms of excess burdens. Chapters further examine how models can be used to search systematically, across a range of policy changes, for revenue-neutral reforms which result in an improvement, in terms of an explicit evaluation function. This will be a timely read for students of public finance, welfare and labour economics. The careful attention paid to metrics used in policy evaluations will also make this a useful book for researchers and policy advisors concerned with income taxation, social transfers, inequality and poverty measurement.

Tax policy questions may relate to specific problems, concerning perhaps the revenue implications of a particular tax or they may involve an extensive analysis of the cost andredistributive effects of many taxes and transfer payments. This book is concerned with the ways in which tax policy design can be enhanced by the use of a behavioural taxmicrosimulation model capable of evaluating the effects of planned or actual tax reforms. An advantage of such a large-scale tax simulation model, which reflects the heterogeneity of the population and captures the details of the tax structure, is that it can examine detailed practical policy questions and can provide direct inputs into policy debates. After introducing behavioural models, the authors discuss the role of means testing, several hypothetical policy reforms, actual and proposed reforms and recent modellingdevelopments. Tax Policy Design and Behavioural Microsimulation Modelling will be of interest to academics and researchers of economics, econometrics and public finance. It will also be useful reading for policymakers responsible for the formulation of taxation.

Microsimulation Modelling of Taxation and the Labour Market reports new research on behavioural microsimulation modelling of tax and transfer systems. Its aims are twofold. Firstly, the book discusses the rationale for the basic modelling approach adopted and provides information on econometric methods used to estimate behavioural relationships. Secondly, it describes the Melbourne Institute Tax and Transfer Simulator (MITTS) in detail, explaining its main features, installation and use. After providing a broad review of tax modelling, the authors review alternative approaches to the analysis of labour supply behaviour, discuss the main components of behavioural microsimulation models and present econometric results concerning wage functions and preferences. They go on to provide a detailed description of MITTS, which was constructed by the authors in order to examine the implications of tax reforms in Australia.

This book provides a detailed introduction to behavioural tax microsimulation methods and reviews the use of such models for evaluating tax policy reforms. The steps required to construct a microsimulation model are described in detail and methods of evaluating policy changes are then presented. Labour Supply and Microsimulation deals with a number of issues related to interpreting results from microsimulation, such as welfare measurement, income distribution, confidence intervals around the simulated results and feedback effects on the wage distribution via labour demand. All of the approaches and proposed methods are general and not model-specific. The book includes detailed descriptions of how labour supply models can be used in building behavioural microsimulation models as well as the development of new methods for evaluating policy reforms; for example, dealing with income distribution in discrete hours models, measuring welfare changes and constructing confidence intervals. John Creedy and Guyonne Kalb's book will appeal to graduate students and academic researchers in the fields of labour economics and public finance. Economists in government departments who wish to use the output from microsimulation models in tax policy analysis and design will also find much to engage them within the book.

This paper addresses the need for a measure of the uncertainty that is associated with the results calculated using tax policy behavioural microsimulation models. Deriving the analytical measure would be extremely complicated. Therefore, a simulated approach is proposed, which approximates the sampling distribution of aggregate measures based on the sampling distribution of the estimated labour supply parameters. This approach, which is very computer intensive, is compared with a more time-efficient approach where the functional form of the sampling distribution is assumed to be normal. The results show that in many instances the results from the two approaches are quite similar. The exception is when aggregate measures for minor types of payments, involving relatively small groups of the population, are examined.

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