Victoria Business School’s Working Papers in Public Finance series
Designing Direct Tax Reforms: Alternative Approaches, Working Paper 01/2020
By Nazila Alinaghi, John Creedy and Norman Gemmell
How high should the top personal income tax rate be? Is there an ‘optimal’ structure of tax rates and thresholds? Despite numerous value judgements being required to answer such questions, this paper suggests that ‘rational policy analysis’ principles can nevertheless be applied to support policy advice on these and other direct tax design questions. It is argued that the economic models thought suitable as the basis for tax analysis vary according to the precise ways in which the policy question is formulated; the underlying behavioural responses to taxation expected across the tax-paying population; the precise definitions of key variables such as income inequality; and the specification of policy objectives such as redistribution, revenue-raising or tax efficiency.
Do Couples Bunch More? Evidence from Partnered and Single Taxpayers in New Zealand, Working Paper 02/2020
By Nazila Alinaghi, John Creedy and Norman Gemmell
Recent papers hypothesise that estimates of the elasticity of taxable income (ETI) for individuals may be biased where those individuals are taxed separately but are part of a couple family. This paper investigates that issue by applying the ‘bunching at tax kinks’ approach to estimate separate ETIs for partnered and single individuals. It shows that there are opportunities for, and constraints on, bunching specific to partnered individuals. Using administrative taxable income data for the New Zealand taxpayer population over the period, 2000 to 2017, individual taxpayers are matched to their partners using population census data. Results provide strong support for the hypotheses that ETIs are larger for individuals in couples than for single individuals, and for couples where both partners are located in the same income tax bracket. Self-employed individuals in couple families reveal especially large ETIs.
New Zealand’s Tax Reforms and ‘Tax Sheltering’ Behaviour, Working Paper 03/2020
This paper examines two episodes of tax reform in New Zealand to evaluate the extent of tax sheltering in New Zealand. Tax sheltering refers to activities undertaken by taxpayers to earn income in forms that allow this income to be ‘sheltered’ (legally or illegally) from the tax that would normally apply in the absence of such activities. Identifying the nature and extent of tax sheltering behaviour is, however, not straightforward given incentives to hide it and the high resource cost of comprehensive taxpayer auditing. As a result, researchers are often reduced to identifying ‘traces’ (in direct and imprecise indicators) of sheltering activity.
This paper examines a variety of variables that can be expected to reveal such traces of sheltering activity related to the ‘legal form’ (corporate, personal, trust, etc.) by which income is earned and taxed. Two substantive reforms to income taxation in New Zealand, in 2000 and 2010, generated two pre- and post-reform tax regimes that allow examination of the issue. The tax regime changes gave rise to different hypothesised effects on ‘legal-form’ tax sheltering that the analysis seeks to exploit.
The results provide strong support for those hypotheses. Firstly, tax changes in 2000 created an incentive for individual taxpayers to reduce their personal taxable income (when they paid the top personal rate), and to shift income towards corporate and trust entities. The evidence is consistent with these predictions. Secondly, reforms in 2010, removed the trust route to tax sheltering and reduced incentives and opportunities to earn income via some, but not all, types of corporate ‘arrangement’. Pre- and post-2010 evidence confirms both that the use of trusts declined, and that the most tax-favoured corporate arrangements increased in use after 2010.
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