Lorenz Kueng

Innocent Bystanders? Monetary Policy and Inequality in the U.S.

We study the effects and historical contribution of monetary policy shocks to consumption and income inequality in the United States since 1980. Contractionary monetary policy actions systematically increase inequality in labor earnings, total income, consumption and total expenditures. Furthermore, monetary shocks can account for a significant component of the historical cyclical variation in income and consumption inequality. Using detailed micro-level data on income and consumption, we document the different channels via which monetary policy shocks affect inequality, as well as how these channels depend on the nature of the change in monetary policy.

Tax News Identifying Tax Expectations from Municipal Bonds with an Application to Household Consumption

Although theoretical models of household behavior often emphasize scal foresight, most empirical studies neglect the role of news, thereby potentially underestimating the total eect of tax changes. Using novel high-frequency bond data, I develop a model of the term structure of municipal yield spreads as a function of future top income tax rates and a risk premium. Testing the model using the presidential elections of 1992 and 2000 as two natural experiments shows that nancial markets forecast future tax rates remarkably well in both the short and long run. Combining these market-based tax expectations with consumption data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, I nd that consumption of high-income households increases by close to 1% in response to news of a 1% increase in expected after-tax lifetime income, consistent with the basic rational-expectations life-cycle theory.

The Impact of Emerging Market Competition on Innovation and Business Strategy

How do firms in high-income countries adjust to emerging market competition? We estimate how a representative panel of Canadian firms adjusts innovation activities, business strategies, and exit in response to large increases in Chinese imports between 1999 and 2005. On average, process innovation declines more strongly than product innovation. In addition, initially more differentiated firms that survive the increase in competition have better performance ex-post, but are ex-ante more likely to exit. Differentiation therefore does not ensure insulation against competitive shocks but instead increases risk.

Sources of Firm Life-Cycle Dynamics: Differentiating Size vs. Age Effects

What determines the life-cycle of businesses? Exploiting unique firm-level panel data on internal organization and innovation we establish three key sets of stylized facts to inform recent theories of firm life-cycles. First, life-cycle effects are driven by startups, not by new establishments of existing firms. Second, organizational restructuring and innovation are both strongly correlated with firm growth but not with firm age, in contrast to passive learning theories of firm dynamics. Third, there are important sectoral differences in innovation activities which are monotonically increasing in firm size for manufacturing firms but hump-shaped for firms in service industries.

Shopping for Lower Sales Tax Rates

Using comprehensive high-frequency state and local sales tax data, we show that shopping behavior responds strongly to changes in sales tax rates. Even though sales taxes are not observed in posted prices and have a wide range of rates and exemptions, consumers adjust in many dimensions. They stock up on storable goods before taxes rise and increase online and cross-border shopping in both the short and long run. The differences between short- and long-run spending responses have important implications for the efficacy of using sales taxes for counter-cyclical policy and for the design of an optimal tax framework. Interestingly, households adjust spending similarly for both taxable and tax-exempt goods. We embed an inventory problem into a continuous-time consumption-savings model and demonstrate that this seemingly irrational behavior is optimal in the presence of shopping trip fixed costs. The model successfully matches estimated short-run and long-run tax elasticities with an implied after-tax reservation wage of

Revisiting the Response of Household Spending to the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend Using CE Data

7-10. We provide additional evidence in favor of this new shopping-complementarity mechanism.

The Taxation of Bonds: A Short Primer

This paper revisits the important contribution of Hsieh (2003) to the analysis of the intertemporal allocation of household consumption. Using total expenditures to normalize income from the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend instead of family income and an extended sample of the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CE), I show that log household spending on nondurables is excessively sensitive to the arrival of this predetermined cash flow, with a statistically significant elasticity between 11% and 16%. The previously estimated non-response can largely be attributed to attenuation bias introduced by substantial measurement error in self-reported before-tax family income, in particular over-reporting of very small values.

Innocent Bystanders? Monetary policy and inequality

The taxation of fixed-income securities is complex, but important for understanding the pricing of bonds. This short primer explains what researchers who are interested in bond pricing should know about the taxation of fixed-income securities. The different tax rules since 1970 are formalized within a simple asset pricing framework.