Browsing by Subject "Taxation"
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Item At Odds with Progress: An Analysis of Minnesota's Municipal Tax Legislation, Metro-Area Fiscal Control, and the Taxpayer's Income Conundrum, 2003-2012(2017-02) McDaniel, BenjaminIn recent decades, cities in the Twin Cities Metro Area have been struggling to balance their budgets to meet their taxpayer’s demand for services. Some state legislators and scholars have long presumed that these problems are the product of the revenue-generating inequalities between individual cities, but this study argues that the problems cities face in generating tax revenues are the product of an increasingly unequal distribution of income between taxpayers.Item Developing resources: industry, policy, and memory on the post-industrial Iron Range.(2009-07) Manuel, Jeffrey ThomasThis dissertation describes the history of the Lake Superior iron mining district, or Iron Range, as it battled against economic decline in the twentieth century. The study addresses four main points significant for historians of the modern United States. First, the Iron Range's struggle with decline offers a useful vantage point for understanding the interconnected role of deindustrialization and liberalism in the late twentieth century. On the Iron Range, politicians at the local, state, and federal level committed themselves to active government involvement in the economic health of the region and especially the iron mining industry. Through high wage, unionized mining jobs, liberal politicians expected that Iron Range residents would continue to support their ambitious plans for active government involvement in social and economic life. Deindustrialization undercut this alliance in a way that liberals and Iron Range residents did not anticipate. As globalization and automation reshaped the iron mining industry, liberal politicians found that their policy tool kits contained few remedies for long-term industrial decline. They had surprisingly few answers for residents of the Iron Range facing shutdowns and layoffs. Conversely, deindustrialization revealed the pragmatic core of many working class Americans' commitment to liberalism. Iron Range miners supported Minnesota's DFL liberals precisely because of the economic benefits liberalism offered to them. Industrial liberalism, it turned out, was built on a foundation of industrial growth. When that growth ended on the Iron Range, politicians and residents worked diligently to maintain their previous political patterns, but the alliance of industrial liberalism gradually eroded as the twentieth century wore on and industrial decline continued. The Iron Range has not followed the now familiar pattern of industrial workers moving from left to right in the late twentieth century, but the politics of the Iron Range suggest a more complicated transition away from industrial liberalism. The Iron Range's response to industrial decline also suggests how the predominant policy response to deindustrialization, economic development policy, was enacted as a local response to national and global problems in the twentieth century. The Iron Range and the state of Minnesota made a concerted effort to avoid the fate of many other industrial regions suffering from decline in the postwar era. In many respects, the Iron Range was unusually successful in fending off the blight of deindustrialization. It retained jobs--often at great public cost--and avoided the fate that befell smaller cities dependent on the steel industry. The Iron Range thus offers an example of the possibilities inherent in vigorous economic development policy during the postwar era. If local and state governments carefully managed their resources and spent enough public money, it was indeed possible to keep industrial jobs alive and fend off the worst effects of deindustrialization. The Iron Range's success with economic development, however, also illustrates the limits of local economic development efforts in responding to what was ultimately a global phenomenon. Despite the earnest efforts of economic development professionals on the Iron Range, it was ultimately impossible to reverse the iron mining industry's increasing automation and globalization during the second half of the twentieth century. It is impossible to separate deindustrialization and technological change in the postwar history of the Iron Range. More than any other factor, technical innovation in the mining industry displaced jobs throughout the twentieth century. Work was increasingly shifted from human laborers to machines through automation. The taconite industry offers the starkest example of how automation--and technological change in general--was a double-edged sword for the Iron Range. On the one hand, the taconite industry opened up vast new deposits for use as iron ore, likely prolonging the life of the Iron Range's mineral deposits by many years. On the other hand, the taconite industry could only become a reality by deconstructing the existing natural ore mining industry. Through technical innovation and the rhetoric of depletion, Edward W. Davis simultaneously constructed the taconite industry and dismantled the natural ore mining business. Touting taconite as a technological miracle to save a depressed Iron Range, scientists and engineers often ignored the destructive work that accompanied their creation. In a larger sense, both industrial regions and labor historians have yet to grapple with the complicated implications of technological change. In much economic development literature, for example, there is still hope that "high-tech" miracles will revive sagging rural economies or that new communication technologies will erase inequalities of distance and capital. Additionally, historians of labor and industry have often downplayed the central role of technological change and automation in reorganizing patterns of work throughout the twentieth century. Finally, the Iron Range's attempt to promote cultural tourism and particularly heritage travel based on mining's history raises thorny questions about the role of history and heritage in depoliticizing industrial change. On the Iron Range, history became a vehicle for moving deindustrialization out of the realm of politics and into an apolitical realm of nostalgia. In museums such as Ironworld, mining's history was simultaneously celebrated and foreclosed as a possible future for the Iron Range. The heritage professionals and historians who created this romanticized story of the Iron Range were not malicious. They were usually driven by a desire to honor and celebrate the lives of hard-working immigrants and the rich communities they created in a harsh landscape. But historical interpretations have consequences and one consequence of their interpretation was to depoliticize industrial change in northeast Minnesota.Item Essays in Inequality and Public Economics(2022-08) Malkov, EgorThis dissertation consists of three chapters which contribute to quantitative and theoretical understanding of inequality and associated public policies. The first essay studies how different should income taxation be across singles and couples. I answer this question using a general equilibrium overlapping generations model that incorporates single and married households, intensive and extensive margins of labor supply, human capital accumulation, and uninsurable idiosyncratic labor productivity risk. The degree of tax progressivity is allowed to vary with marital status. I parameterize the model to match the U.S. economy and find that couples should be taxed less progressively than singles. Relative to the actual U.S. tax system, the optimal reform reduces progressivity for couples and increases it for singles. The key determinants of optimal policy for couples relative to singles include the detrimental effects of joint taxation and progressivity on labor supply and human capital accumulation of married secondary earners, the degree of assortative mating, and within-household insurance through responses of spousal labor supply. I conclude that explicitly modeling couples and accounting for the extensive margin of labor supply and human capital accumulation is qualitatively and quantitatively important for the optimal policy design. In the second essay, I develop a framework for assessing the welfare effects of labor income tax changes on married couples. I build a static model of couples' labor supply that features both intensive and extensive margins and derive a tractable expression that delivers a transparent understanding of how labor supply responses, policy parameters, and income distribution affect the reform-induced welfare gains. Using this formula, I conduct a comparative welfare analysis of four tax reforms implemented in the United States over the last four decades, namely the Tax Reform Act of 1986, the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993, the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001, and the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. I find that these reforms created welfare gains ranging from -0.16% to 0.62% of aggregate labor income. A sizable part of the gains is generated by the labor force participation responses of women. Despite three reforms resulting in aggregate welfare gains, I show that each reform created winners and losers. Furthermore, I uncover two patterns in the relationship between welfare gains and couples' labor income. In particular, the reforms of 1986 and 2017 display a monotonically increasing relationship, while the other two reforms demonstrate a U-shaped pattern. Finally, I characterize the bias in welfare gains resulting from the assumption about a linear tax function. I consider a reform that changes tax progressivity and show that the linearization bias is given by the ratio between the tax progressivity parameter and the inverse elasticity of taxable income. Quantitatively, it means that linearization overestimates the welfare effects of the U.S. tax reforms by 3.6-18.1%. The third essay studies the policies that are aimed at mitigating COVID-19 transmission. Most economic papers that explore the effects of COVID-19 assume that recovered individuals have a fully protected immunity. In 2020, there was no definite answer to whether people who recover from COVID-19 could be reinfected with the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). In the absence of a clear answer about the risk of reinfection, it is instructive to consider the possible scenarios. To study the epidemiological dynamics with the possibility of reinfection, I use a Susceptible-Exposed-Infectious-Resistant-Susceptible model with the time-varying transmission rate. I consider three different ways of modeling reinfection. The crucial feature of this study is that I explore both the difference between the reinfection and no-reinfection scenarios and how the mitigation measures affect this difference. The principal results are the following. First, the dynamics of the reinfection and no-reinfection scenarios are indistinguishable before the infection peak. Second, the mitigation measures delay not only the infection peak, but also the moment when the difference between the reinfection and no-reinfection scenarios becomes prominent. These results are robust to various modeling assumptions.Item Minutes: Senate Committee on Faculty Affairs: Retirement Subcommittee: June 6, 2005(University of Minnesota, 2005-06-06) University of Minnesota: Retirement SubcommitteeItem State asemblage in the Republic of Georgia.(2010-12) Schueth, Samuel J.States of the former communist block have not followed a single, linear path of transition from "plan to market." In the westernmost states, entering the European Union propelled the transformation of communist political and economic institutions. Further east, former Soviet Union (FSU) states exhibit lesser degrees of political pluralism and privatization without a European trajectory of transition. Yet, since its 2003 "Rose Revolution," Georgia's radical departure from the post-Soviet partial-reform status quo has presented important challenges path-dependency arguments about political and economic transition and development. Georgia's transformation exposes a major gap in a literature that has failed to ask how states may rapidly gain new governmental and developmental capacities. To understand Georgia's political and economic transformation after the Rose Revolution this dissertation analyzes the legal reforms and governmental tactics used over 2003-2007 to successfully attract high rates of inward foreign investment (Chapter 2) and to more than triple central government tax revenue (Chapter 3). I use assemblage theory, drawing on concepts developed by Deleuze and Guattari (e.g. 1987) and Delanda (2002; 2006) among others, to analyze the emergence of these new state capacities. Exegesis of an assemblage theory of the state is the focus of Chapter 4. A final, fifth chapter concludes.