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Working Paper
Legal fee restrictions, moral hazard, and attorney profits
When attorney effort is unobservable and certain other simplifying assumptions (such as risk neutrality) hold, it is efficient for an attorney to purchase the rights to a client's legal claim. However, the American Bar Association Model Rules of Professional Conduct prohibit this arrangement. We show that this ethical restriction, which is formally equivalent to requiring a minimum fixed fee of zero, can create economic rents for attorneys, even though they continue to compete along the contingent-fee dimension. The contingent fee is not bid down to the zero-profit level, because such a fee ...
Journal Article
The federal budget: what a difference a year makes
Working Paper
The welfare effects of pay-as-you-go retirement programs: the role of tax and benefit timing
It is well known that pay-as-you-go retirement programs reduce steady-state welfare and the capital stock in dynamically efficient OLG economies. The common two-period OLG model obscures, however, the dependence of these effects on the ages at which taxes are paid and benefits are received. Program changes that shift taxes to older workers or benefits to younger retirees have effects similar to reductions in program size, yielding steady-state welfare gains and increases in capital accumulation while imposing transition costs on current generations. This analysis has policy implications for ...
Journal Article
Social Security and Medicare: no free lunch
Journal Article
Social Security restructuring: tough decisions ahead
Journal Article
The transition to consumption taxation, part 1: the impact on existing capital
Alan Viard reviews the transitional impact on existing capital from replacing the income tax with a consumption tax. This replacement generally reduces the real value of existing capital because it does not receive the tax relief given to new investment. If the income and consumption taxes had stylized forms and capital were produced without adjustment costs, the proportional decline would equal the consumption tax rate--a 25 percent tax would uniformly reduce the value of existing capital by 25 percent. Under more realistic assumptions, however, the actual decline is likely to be smaller ...
Working Paper
Are income taxes destined to rise? the fiscal imbalance and future tax policy
We present a model of optimizing government behavior in which a need for increased revenue leads to the introduction of a new revenue source, such as a VAT, accompanied by a reduction in income taxes. We argue that this is a plausible outcome for the United States, in view of international experience and recent fiscal reform proposals, and has important implications for individual investment decisions.
Journal Article
The looming challenge of the alternative minimum tax
The United States adopted its first minimum income tax in 1969 in response to reports that a few hundred high-income individuals had avoided paying any income taxes. From these humble beginnings, the alternative minimum tax (AMT) has grown to the point where it will soon raise taxes for millions of Americans, many of them middle-income workers who weren?t the targets of the original law. ; While the AMT applied to 200,000 taxpayers in 1990, roughly 4 million will pay it this year, according to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. But that is only the beginning. Under current law, the AMT ...
Journal Article
The new budget outlook: policymakers respond to the surplus
Economic events and policy changes have unexpectedly moved the federal budget into surplus. If current policies are maintained, surpluses are expected to continue for twenty years, although deficits are expected to return after 2020. Congress and President Clinton are considering proposals to reduce the projected surpluses through tax cuts or spending increases. In this article, Alan Viard describes the recent budget events and the new budget outlook. He analyzes the effects of the proposed tax cuts and spending increases, finding that they are likely to reduce national saving and lower ...
Journal Article
The Federal budget: developments and outlook