The Macroeconomic Effects of Income and Consumption Tax Changes

Anh Nguyen, Luisanna Onnis and Raffaele Rossi

Centre for Growth and Business Cycle Research Discussion Paper Series from Economics, The University of Manchester

Abstract: Do income and consumption tax changes affect the economy differently? We answer this question by estimating structural VARs, where we proxy the latent tax shocks with a newly constructed narrative account of income and consumption tax liability changes in the United Kingdom. We find that income tax shocks have large short run effects on GDP, private consumption and investment. The effects of consumption tax cuts are modest and not statistically different from zero on GDP and investment and only marginally expansionary on private consumption. These results indicate that i) it is crucial to distinguish between direct and indirect taxation when studying the transmission mechanism of fiscal policy, and ii) consistent with conventional public finance theories, consumption taxes are less distortive than income taxes.

Pages: 51 pages
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pbe and nep-pub
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://hummedia.manchester.ac.uk/schools/soss/cgb ... apers/dpcgbcr227.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Macroeconomic Effects of Income and Consumption Tax Changes (2021)
Working Paper: The Macroeconomic Effects of Income and Consumption Tax Changes (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:man:cgbcrp:227

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Centre for Growth and Business Cycle Research Discussion Paper Series from Economics, The University of Manchester Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Patrick Macnamara ().