Over the last two decades, New Zealand experienced a threefold increase in housing prices. The largest surge in prices in recent years occurred between 1998 and 2007, a period of housing price growth in many developed economies. Since 2007, housing price growth remained flat until 2011, and then...

It is important for the design of tax policy to be able to measure reliably the income elasticity of tax revenue. This gives the extent to which tax revenues change as a result of a change in earnings. Analytical expressions for income tax revenue elasticities treat earnings as exogenous, so...

This paper constructs an endogenous growth model, applicable largely to developing countries, based on human capital accumulation in which education is publicly provided and financed, and schooling is compulsory. Public investment in human and physical capital are financed from taxes on wage and...

This paper provides estimates of individual and aggregate revenue elasticities of income and consumption taxes in New Zealand, based on the 2001 tax structure and expenditure patterns. Using analytical expressions for revenue elasticities at the individual and aggregate levels, together with a...

Recent evidence on the impact of fiscal policy – taxes, public expenditures and budget deficits – on long-run growth in OECD countries has adopted the Barro (1990) framework to distinguish between ‘productive' and ‘unproductive' expenditures, and ‘distortionary' and...

The redistributive and efficiency aspects of personal taxes are of particular interest to both economists and governments designing tax reforms. Traditionally however, the numerous analytical tools available to calculate distributional and efficiency effects of taxes and transfers are not widely...

This paper examines the elasticity of tax revenue with respect to a marginal rate change, at both the individual and aggregate level. The roles of the elasticity of taxable income (the behavioural effect on taxable income of a tax rise) and the revenue elasticity (the structural effect on...

Estimates of marginal tax rates (MTRs) faced by individual economic agents, and for various ggregates of taxpayers, are important for economists testing behavioural responses to changes in those tax rates. This paper reports estimates of a number of personal marginal income tax rate measures for...

This paper examines estimation of the elasticity of taxable income using instrumental variable regression methods. It is argued that the standard instrument for the net-of-tax rate - the rate that would be applicable post-reform but with unchanged income levels - is unsatisfactory in contexts...

This paper examines the extent to which projected aggregate tax revenue changes, in association with population ageing over the next 50 years, can be expected to finance expected increases in social welfare expenditures. It uses projections from two separate models, dealing with social...