Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas, Programa de Pós-graduação em Sociologia Política, Florianópolis, 2011; O presente trabalho de pesquisa parte de uma análise do conceito de capital financeiro. Este tem sido utilizado com freqüência para designar as transformações no capitalismo contemporâneo, sobretudo, a verificada no âmbito das grandes empresas e o seu forte entrelaçamento com os grandes bancos. Constata-se, que os grandes monopólios e oligopólios, assumiram os principais setores econômicos, e isto, tanto em nível nacional quanto internacional. A reprodução do capital vai se concentrando e centralizando, cada vez mais, na forma das sociedades anônimas. Mas, se isto se confirma na práxis, entendeu-se como necessidade teórica, voltar ao seio do materialismo histórico para uma melhor compreensão do conceito de capital industrial, em especial pelo fato de Marx não trabalhar em sua obra com o conceito de capital financeiro. Neste sentido, foi através de uma revisão teórica do conceito de capital industrial, que se tornou possível apreender o movimento de valorização do capital, em seu ciclo de reprodução, qual seja, o ciclo do capital industrial. Verificou-se que o capital ao se reproduzir...

The Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 (TRA97) significantly changed the tax treatment of housing capital gains in the United States. Before 1997, homeowners were subject to capital gains taxation when they sold their houses unless they purchased replacement homes of equal or greater value. Since 1997, homeowners can exclude capital gains of $500,000 (or $250,000 for single filers) when they sell their houses. Such dramatic changes provide a good opportunity to study the lock-in effect of capital gains taxation on home sales. Using 1982–2008 transaction data on single-family houses in 16 affluent towns within the Boston metropolitan area, I find that TRA97 reversed the lock-in effect of capital gains taxes on houses with low and moderate capital gains. Specifically, the semiannual sales rate of houses with positive gains up to $500,000 increased by 0.40–0.62 percentage points after TRA97, representing a 19–24 percent increase from the pre-TRA97 baseline sales rate. In contrast, I do not find TRA97 to have a significant effect on houses with gains above $500,000. Moreover, the short-term effect of TRA97 is much larger than the long-term effect, suggesting that many previously locked-in homeowners took advantage of the exclusions immediately after TRA97. In addition...

The accumulated experience of emerging markets over the past two decades has laid bare the tenuous links between external financial integration and faster growth, on the one hand, and the proclivity of such integration to fuel costly crises on the other. These crises have not gone without learning. During the 1990s and 2000s, emerging markets converged to the middle ground of the policy space defined by the macroeconomic trilemma, with growing financial integration, controlled exchange rate flexibility, and proactive monetary policy. The OECD countries moved much faster toward financial integration, embracing financial liberalization, opting for a common currency in Europe, and for flexible exchange rates in other OECD countries. Following their crises of 1997-2001, emerging markets added financial stability as a goal, self-insured by building up international reserves, and adopted a public finance approach to financial integration. The global crisis of 2008-2009, which originated in the financial sector of advanced economies...

The business cycle effects of bank capital regulatory regimes are examined in a New Keynesian model with credit market imperfections and a cost channel of monetary policy. Key features of the model are that bank capital increases incentives for banks to monitor borrowers, thereby reducing the probability of default, and excess capital generates benefits in terms of reduced regulatory scrutiny. Basel I and Basel II-type regulatory regimes are defined, and the model is calibrated for a middle-income country. Simulations of supply and demand shocks show that, depending on the elasticity that relates the repayment probability to the capital-loan ratio, a Basel II-type regime may be less procyclical than a Basel I-type regime.

The author evaluates the effectiveness of policy measures adopted by Chile and Colombia, aiming to mitigate the deleterious effects of pro-cyclical capital flows. In the case of Chile, according to his Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) analysis, capital controls succeeded in reducing net short-term capital flows but did not affect long-term flows. As far as Colombia is concerned, the regulations were capable of affecting total flows and also long-term ones. In addition, the co-integration models indicate that the regulations did not have a direct effect on the real exchange rate in the Chilean case. Nonetheless, the model used for Colombia did detect a direct impact of the capital controls on the real exchange rate. Therefore, the results do not seem to support the idea that those regulations were easily evaded.

Lebanese capital market is relatively small as the financial market is dominated by the banking sector. It is apparent that banks dominate financial intermediation in Lebanon to the extent it may inhibit the development of capital markets. Government sees the need to develop capital markets to help finance corporate growth and infrastructure development. It is incumbent on the Government to establish a comprehensive capital market development program, which includes efforts to increase supply and demand, strengthen supervision and enforcement, and must be accompanied by an effective outreach campaign, both domestically and internationally. On the demand side, creating a steady flow of investment into instruments with a long-term horizon, primarily from the pension and insurance sectors, will help grow the markets. Increased demand from institutional investors and issuance by large companies will attract more companies to the capital markets. All these efforts need to be complemented by the issuance of effective regulations...

A yes income tax would not affect asset values or investment decisions for given values of cash flows and pre-tax interest rates (Samuelson, 1964). However, most so-called income taxes do not fully tax capital gains on accrual. This note shows that in the absence of adjustment costs, investment decisions are not distorted by the lack of a comprehensive tax on the capital gains on unimproved land, provided that the depreciation of improvements is allowed as a tax deduction. It also provides the intuition underlying the closely related results of Hartman (1978) and Abel (1983).; no

This paper reports estimates of effective tax rates on rental property income in Australia. We consider three capital gains tax regimes – the current Australian system, that which prevailed between 1985 and 1999 and a realisation tax that attempts to mimic an accruals tax. We report estimates for each regime in two scenarios—slow anticipated real capital gains and very rapid unanticipated real capital gains. Our results suggest that negative gearing should be retained and capital gains taxation reformed to approximate an accruals tax. We argue that this desirable package would be no harder to administer than the current regime.; yes

Failure to separate unexpected capital gains and losses on natural assets from depletion breaks the link between Net National Product (NNP) and sustainability. In addition, for resource rich countries this can lead to large spurious fluctuations in NNP, making it virtually useless for policy purposes. In contrast, when depletion is measured correctly, the link between NNP and sustainability is restored and there is no reason to expect NNP to be any more volatile than GNP. Oil data for Great Britain and Indonesia are used to illustrate the very significant impact that the treatment of capital gains and depletion can have on NNP.; no

Die vorliegende Dissertation zum Thema „Theoretische und Empirische Aspekte der Besteuerung von Veräußerungsgewinnen“ beschäftigt sich mit den Effekten der Besteuerung von realisierten Wertsteigerungen beim Anteilsverkauf. In dieser Arbeit werden zum einen normative (Manuskript 1) sowie steuerplanerische Ansätze (Manuskript 2 und 3) modelltheoretisch untersucht, zum anderen werden empirisch die Auswirkungen der Veräußerungsgewinnbesteuerung auf Anlageentscheidungen (Manuskript 4) sowie die Gesamtsteuerbelastung von Individuen (Manuskript 5) analysiert. Im ersten Manuskript werden anhand eines einfachen Wachstumsmodells unter Sicherheit die Steuerwirkungen der Veräußerungsgewinnbesteuerung beim Anteilshandel in verschiedenen Entscheidungssituationen untersucht. Die Veräußerungsgewinnbesteuerung induziert neben der Körperschaft- und der Einkommensteuer auf die Ausschüttungen eine dritte Steuerbelastung einbehaltener Gewinne im Fall des Anteilshandels zwischen Privatpersonen. Im Gegensatz dazu kann in einem klassischen Körperschaftsteuersystem bzw. in einem Shareholder-Relief-Verfahren die Steuerbelastung auf Ausschüttungen gesenkt werden, wenn man anstelle von Dividenden den Aktienrückkauf als Ausschüttungsweg wählt. Werden in einem Steuersystem Dividenden steuerfrei gestellt...

This paper was presented to the Forty-Fourth Annual Meeting of the Western Economic Association, "Tax Reform and Voting" concurrent session VII at 10:30 a.m. Thursday 21 August 1969, and is abstracted in the Western Economic Journal , VII No. 4 (September 1969).; Unless tax policy is evaluated not only from a short-run macroeconomic fiscal policy standpoint but also from a longer-run microeconomic policy standpoint that considers taxation's effects upon equity and resource allocation efficiency, federal taxation's unnecessary excess burden will become no lighter and may grow heavier. This paper attempts to redress the balance of the current federal personal and corporate income tax reform discussion, which has paid minimal attention to the case for heavier capital gains taxation. It reviews the capital gains tax policy literature, argues that present tax law's special treatment of capital gains and losses (compared with its treatment of ordinary income and loss) is not justified, and offers specific recommendations for taxing capital gains more heavily. Special treatment is horizontally and vertically inequitable. It is a major cause of income tax law complexity. And it misallocates the resources invested in new physical capital...

This paper offers an assessment of the methodologies employed to estimate the economic opportunity cost of capital for public sector projects, relying on the Mexican case for an applied empirical exercise. The traditional weighted cost of capital (top-down) approach used in the estimation of Mexico's economic opportunity cost of capital is reviewed and compared to the supply price (bottom-up) approach. With respect to previous studies using the top-down approach, this paper explores the contribution of domestic savings and expands the analysis to include a more detailed examination of the available macroeconomic, labor, financial, and tax information. The re-estimated top-down economic opportunity cost of capital for Mexico comes to 10.4 percent. To confirm these results and provide additional insights regarding the alternative bottom-up approach, the economic opportunity cost of capital is estimated using the supply price plus externalities method. For the case of Mexico, this paper recommends using a combination of estimation models (both the top-down and bottom-up approaches) to check the consistency of results and re-estimating the economic opportunity cost of capital every five years to accommodate for macroeconomic and fiscal changes. More broadly...

The authors review the options for reform of stamp duties on immovable property transfers collected by Indian state governments. After briefly reviewing some of the many administrative difficulties experienced with the tax, they turn to an examination of its economic impacts. A review of stamp duties internationally indicates that Indian rates are exceptionally high, at rates often above 10 percent. Most countries' rates are less than 5 percent, including a number of low and middle-income developing countries. With these high rates, the authors find that while the tax has become the third largest revenue source for many Indian states, it imposes high compliance costs on taxpayers, has been subject to a good deal of evasion and fraud, and the distortionary impacts appear to be large, reducing the responsiveness of real estate markets in Indian cities by discouraging transactions essential to the efficient growth of cities. The authors then study the revenue implications of lowering stamp duty rates, which need to be understood if reform is to be viable. Evidence indicates that the current high duty rates...

Privatization has been a popular strategy for improving efficiency in both market and transition economies. The literature on privatization includes broad discussions of pricing techniques but overlooks tax issues. In reality, a state-owned company loses its privilege of paying no taxes once it is privatized. This change in tax status would certainly complicate the financial transaction of a newly privatized company, affect industry-wide economic efficiency, and change the revenue pattern of governments. Using Ontario Hydro and the Canadian tax regime as examples, the authors provide policymakers with a checklist on tax issues under privatization. Their main observations: 1) The tax status of the company to be privatized must be considered in analyzing the firm's financial transition. 2) The economic efficiency targeted by privatization may depend partly on the tax regime for a particular industry. 3) Privatization affects government revenue through the revenue-sharing structure determined by intergovernmental fiscal relationships and cross-border tax arrangements. Time is a factor in tax and transition issues. At the time of privatization...

The authors study whether capital controls affect the link between domestic and foreign stock market prices and interest rates. To examine the characteristics of international market integration and the effects of capital controls in the short and long run, they apply band-pass filter techniques to data from six emerging economics during the 1990s. They find that markets seem to be linked more at longer horizons. Equity prices seem to be more connected internationally than interest rates. They also find little evidence that controls effectively segment domestic markets from foreign markets. And when they do, the effects seem to be short-lived. Moreover, the effects of controls on outflows do not seem to differ from those of controls on inflows. For example, controls on outflows in Venezuela during the 1994 crisis, and unremunerated reserve requirements in Chile and Colombia during a capital-inflow episode, seem to have shielded domestic markets at the most at very high frequencies. The degree of financial sophistication does not seem to affect the authors' conclusion on the insulation provided by capital controls. True...

We analyze a simple overlapping-generations model with two capital goods. The dynamical system is defined by savings behavior and short-run perfect-foresight asset-market clearing. Because lifetimes are finite, there is no transversality condition. If there is a bubble in asset pricing, it will burst in finite time: expectations will eventually be frustrated, but this might take several generations. This raises the question of whether (infinite) long-run perfect foresight is a reasonable assumption for overlapping-generations economies and, hence, whether bursting bubbles can occur in equilibrium.

Taxation of capital gains at realization may distort individuals' decisions regarding holding or selling during an asset's lifetime. This creates the problem of designing a tax structure for capital gains so as to induce efficient patterns of holding and selling. Several tax structures are explored in this paper. Linear taxation, at rates which rise with the holding period, can achieve the first best, even under the conditions of limited information that we postulate. The form of the optimal tax is independent of the stochastic structure of rates of return. We also derive the optimal nonlinear tax under the constraint that it be independent of the holding period. Second-best tax rules are examined. Results in a two-period model are contrasted with those in a continuous time framework. Also treated is the case in which the returns to the asset under consideration depend on the aggregate quantity invested.; Economics

[Introduction] The remarkable phenomenon of bubbles and crashes in laboratory asset markets was first discovered and reported in Smith et al (1988). Subsequent research inquired about the robustness of the phenomenon and how it might be explained. One interpretation of the data is that public knowledge of rationality is lacking in the subjects, which leads to a type of individually rational, bubble creating speculation as part of an attempt to acquire capital gains. A different interpretation is that subjects begin with a type of confusion or mistaken understanding about this particular environment and that such “irrationality” at the individual level initiates the bubble, which could be sustained by a lack of common knowledge of rationality even after all confusion becomes removed during the process of participating in the market. This paper explores these two ideas through the study of experiments in which a capital gains tax is imposed that makes speculation for capital gains unprofitable except under extreme circumstances.

This paper studies the interaction between negative gearing and three capital gains tax regimes - the current Australian system, the one that prevailed between 1985 and 1999 and a realisation tax that mimics an accruals tax. We report estimates of the effective rates of income tax for each regime in two scenarios - slow anticipated real capital gains and very rapid unanticipated real capital gains. We conclude that negative gearing should be retained and capital gains taxation reformed to approximate an accruals tax. This desirable package would be no harder to administer than the current regime.

Regulatory developments are often presented as being in the public interest but recent studies on corporate governance have suggested otherwise. In some cases, regulatory change is driven more by the self-interest of the political elite than by the need for substantive reform. This paper adds to this debate by considering whether capital gains tax (CGT) in South Africa is an example of a genuine attempt to improve the perceived fairness of the tax system or whether perceptions of fairness are being used simply to further political agendas. The paper concludes that the latter may be the case. South Africa is used as a case study because of the fairly recent introduction of CGT, as an example of a material amendment to tax policy, and because of the country's fairly recent transition to democracy.