Endogenous income taxes and indeterminacy in dynamic models: When Diamond meets Ramsey again.

Zhang, Yan and Chen, Yan (2009): Endogenous income taxes and indeterminacy in dynamic models: When Diamond meets Ramsey again.

Abstract

This paper introduces fiscal increasing returns, through endogenous labor income tax rates as in Schmitt-Grohe and Uribe (1997), into the overlapping generations model with endogenous labor, consumption in both periods of life and homothetic preferences (e.g., Lloyd-Braga, Nourry and Venditti, 2007). We show that under numerical calibrations of the parameters, local indeterminacy can occur for distortionary tax rates that are empirically plausible for the U.S. economy, provided that the elasticity of capital-labor substitution and the wage elasticity of the labor supply are large enough, and the elasticity of intertemporal substitution in consumption is slightly greater than unity. These indeterminacy conditions are similar to those obtained within infinite horizon models and from this point of view, Diamond meets Ramsey again.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: Indeterminacy; Endogenous labor income tax rate.
• Subjects: E - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics > E3 - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles > E32 - Business Fluctuations ; Cycles; C - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods > C6 - Mathematical Methods ; Programming Models ; Mathematical and Simulation Modeling > C62 - Existence and Stability Conditions of Equilibrium

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