Maik T. Schneider

Taxation, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship

We examine how basic research should be financed. While basic research is a public good benefiting innovating entrepreneurs it also affects the entire economy: occupational choices of potential entrepreneurs, wages of workers, dividends to shareholders, and aggregate output. We show that the general economy impact of basic research rationalizes a pecking order of taxation to finance basic research. In particular, in a society with desirable dense entrepreneurial activity, a large share of funds for basic research should be financed by labor taxation and a minor share is left to profit taxation. Such tax schemes induce a significant share of agents to become entrepreneurs, thereby rationalizing substantial investments in basic research. These entrepreneurial economies, however, may make a majority of citizens worse off if those individuals do not possess shares of final good producers in the economy. In such circumstances, stagnation may prevail.

Who Writes the Bill? The Role of the Agenda-Setter in Legislative Lobbying

We examine lobby influence on policy outcomes in a legislative vote-buying model with two competing lobbyists and endogenous policy proposals. We compare two polar cases: (1) the committee or (2) the lobbyist seeking policy change writes the bill. Surprisingly, we find that if salience is low, the committee proposes more extreme policy changes than the pro-change lobbyist even though the policy preferences of the committee are more moderate. The opposite is true if salience is high. We also show that the extreme proposals when salience is low do not necessarily involve lower welfare relative to the lobbyists proposal.

Tax contracts, party bargaining, and government formation ☆

We explore how tax contracts affect government formation and welfare of voters in a democracy with proportional elections, four parties and sincere voting. A tax contract specifies a range of tax rates a party is committed to if in government. We develop a new model of party competition and formation of the government which chooses tax rates, public-good provision, and perks. We show that the introduction of tax contracts has two effects: a perks effect and a policy-shift effect. The former plays a central role in societies with a low degree of political polarization, where it tends to reduce politicians’ perks. In highly polarized societies, tax contracts can yield more moderate political outcomes. However, there exist circumstances in which tax contracts induce more extreme policies.

Knowledge Codification and Endogenous Growth

The usual models of endogenous growth treat knowledge codification as a byproduct of R&D and as costless. In contrast to this, one can observe great efforts of private firms for the purposeful codification of knowledge. We incorporate costly knowledge codification in an overlapping generations framework of endogenous growth and show that the steady-state growth rate of capital being higher than that of the knowledge stock is a sufficient condition for knowledge codification. With decreasing codification costs, every overlapping generations economy will be codifying in the long run if the rate at which the costs decline is higher than or equal to the steady-state growth rate of knowledge.