Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1966. / Vita. Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 371-381).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin, 1966. / Vita. Tables. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 371-381).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of economics, March 2001. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis--Wisconsin. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 250-259).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 476-497).

I present three essays on income taxation in Pakistan. The first essay investigates how taxes influence agents’ earnings, compliance and business organization choices. Using a tax reform introduced in Pakistan in 2010, which raised tax rates on partnership earnings as compared to sole proprietorship income, as a natural policy experiment, I (i) identify a full range of behavioral responses to the tax rate changes (ii) study the determinants of tax compliance (iii) investigate if VAT causes firms to be more tax compliant. Relying on administrative tax records that comprise the universe of income tax returns filed in 2006-11 and a rich set of firm characteristics, I find that the reform induced substantial extensive and intensive margin responses including reduction in earnings, income shifting, movement into informality, and spillover effects on VAT base. I also find that the firms that have greater fraction of their tax withheld at source, are registered for VAT, or withhold taxes of other agents are more tax compliant. This highlights the importance of the notion that information trails on arm-length business transactions facilitate enforcement. Comparing short-term responses of partnership firms – which arguably identify tax evasion – on both sides of the VAT exemption threshold, I find that the evasion changes discontinuously at the cutoff suggesting that the VAT causes firms to be more compliant. In the second essay, I along with my co-authors, analyze the design of tax systems under imperfect enforcement. A common policy in developing countries is to impose minimum tax schemes whereby firms are taxed either on profits or on turnover (with a much lower tax rate on turnover), depending on which tax liability is larger. This is a production inefficient tax policy, but has been motivated by the idea that turnover taxes are harder to evade. Such schemes give rise to kink points in firms’ choice sets as the tax rate and tax base jump discontinuously at a profit rate threshold. Analyzing responses to one such scheme in Pakistan, we find large bunching of corporate firms around the minimum tax kink. We show that the combined tax rate and tax base change at the kink provides small real incentives for bunching, making the policy ideal for eliciting evasion. Based on the methodology that we develop, we estimate that turnover taxes reduce evasion by up to 60-70% of corporate income. In the third essay, I along with Henrik Kleven, develop a framework for non-parametrically identifying optimization frictions and structural elasticities using notches – discontinuities in the choice sets of agents – introduced for example by tax and transfer policies. We apply our framework to tax notches in personal income tax schedule of Pakistan to estimate structural elasticities of taxable income.

Empirical studies in labour economics often suffer from endogeneity problems. Employing exogenous variations in policies and natural shock, this thesis investigates three topics. The �first two topics concern labour market phenomena in Thailand, whereas the third provides a case study of labour demand adjustment after an international supply chain shock. Chapter 2 assesses the impact of minimum wage policy on wage inequality in Thailand. The result is rather mixed. Although the minimum wage effectively reduces wage inequality among workers in formal sectors, it does not affect the wage distribution in the informal sector at all. The evidence suggests that such a result is mainly driven by weak law enforcement. Meanwhile, using changes in compulsory schooling law, chapter 3 provides consistent estimates of the rates of return to education in Thailand. Based on the IV method, only female employees experience a positive and significant return to (upper primary) education. Interestingly, the size and direction of bias of the estimator, especially for male sub-sample, are not consistent with the conventional result. The possible reasons underlying these �findings are elaborated. Chapter 4 relies on a different type of shock. The Great Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami 2011 is treated as an external shock to the international supply chain of Auto industry. Then I estimate the impact of the supply chain disruption on labour inputs adjustment in the US auto industry. Despite the break down in supply chain of motor vehicle parts and accessories among Japanese auto companies, these �firms do not seem to reduce their labour inputs (used as a proxy for changes in production) significantly except for a small drop in average monthly earnings of workers in Japanese assembly plants. Also, their competitors make only slight adjustment to capitalize on the Japanese loss. Regarding other margins of adjustment, there is no evidence in support of the adjustment through import or price. Yet inventories and sales incentive appear to be major tools employed to mitigate either positive demand or negative supply shocks on both groups of companies.

The local economic information base for the UK does not meet the demand for local economic indicators emerging from the private and public sectors. This thesis identifies an 'information gap' between the need for and provision of local economic indicators in the public and private sectors. The existence of this 'gap' emerges in the literature review. Empirical evidence of the gap is provided by the thesis' postal survey (which investigates the use of local economic information in forecasting). The dearth of local economic indicators is then confirmed in the analysis of guided interviews with practitioners. The literature review and practitioner interviews identify a rising need for local economic indicators over the last decade. The increased political significance of local space has led to a growth in the need for information at this scale from the public sector. Organisational restructuring and the privatisation of utilities has also led an increase in demand from the private sector for local economic information. This need has been compounded by deficiencies in those local economic indicators which are currently available, in terms of quality, organisation and accessibility. The literature suggests that standardisation of the criteria for organising local economic indicators into a database would greatly assist the organisations that seek this information. However, no such set of criteria has been forthcoming. The thesis therefore incorporates a feasibility study which focuses on the establishment of a standardised local economic database. The research findings steer suggestions for its development, and local economic indicators for the Local Authority District (LAD) ofLuton are collected and organised into a database as a case study. The methodology is documented, and can be reproduced to develop a similar database for any other LAD in the UK.

This thesis investigates empirically the relationship between money, income and interest rates in the U.K. over the period 1963 to 1978. After developing univariate models of the time series' proxying these theoretical variables, the paradox existing between the conventional theoretical model, the IS/LM framework, and the usual empirical practice of directly estimating the demand for money function is investigated. It is shown that the crucial issues are the exogeneity assumptions placed on the IS/LM framework. As such assumptions cannot be tested in a static framework, a dynamic analogue of the IS/LM model is developed, along with appropriate methods for testing exogeneity in dynamic multivariate systems. Empirical tests show that the assumptions of the exogeneity of money and government expenditure are invalid, but that the direct estimation of demand for money functions is appropriate. This leads to an investigation of the dynamic structure and functional form of this function using recently developed techniques based on specification search procedures. A major conclusion of this study is that the IS/LM model is an invalid framework for empirical research, and in particular money cannot be regarded as being exogenously determined. Indeed, there is no evidence of feedback from money to either real income or prices, although both statistical and economic reasons are advanced for the possibility that such feedback cannot be detected by the techniques employed. Important short run dynamic effects are found on the demand for money with respect to real income, prices and interest rates. Furthermore, both the wage rate and an own rate of interest variable are also important determinants of money demand. The demand for narrow money function also exhibits sensible long run behaviour and has an adequate predictive performance but, unfortunately, the broad money function has no long run properties and predicts unsatisfactorily.

The 1980s and 1990s are historical periods of economic reforms in both China and the former Soviet Union. Comparative study of principal proposals of economic reform and transformation in the two countries in this period is the subject of this thesis. There are five main chapters excluding the introduction. Chapter 2 is the theoretical framework of the thesis which is based on essential concepts of Comparative Economic System. Before the main theme began, primary economic problems and difficulties in pre-reform periods in China and the former Soviet Union were discussed in Chapter 3. So was a brief review of reform efforts in the past in the two countries. In Chapter 4, major proposals of economic reform in Chinese economy from late 1978 till 1992 were studied. These included reform measures in the rural economy, the opening up policy, state-owned enterprises reform, new policy for non-state sector and comprehensive plans after 1985. Chapter 5 discussed the 1987 reform package, the 1990 reform plans including Presidential Plan and Shatalin Plan. A brief summary of the Russian reform plan in 1991 was also done in this chapter. Chapter 6 is the concluding part of the thesis. The author compared in detail the two cases and drew conclusions as the following: (a) Both Chinese and Soviet reformers designed the transformation from centralised planning control to decentralised market-oriented economy; (b) The structures of the existing economic system, i.e., decision--making, information, motivation and ownership structures, required various degrees of alteration in the two countries. Soviet reformers called for massive destatisation and privatisation of the state-owned undertakings, while China insisted on a structure with predominant state-owned enterprises; (c) The economic reforms strategies in the two countries are different.