Cette thèse est une étude appliquée de la taxation optimale et du risque du revenu en amérique latine, en particulier pour l'argentine, le chili, la colombie et le mexique. En faisant face a des niveaux élevés d'inégalité de revenu, l'impôt sur le revenu est pour l'amérique latine un outil essentiel de redistribution qui jusqu'à présent, n'a pas été pleinement exploité. L'un des objectifs de cette thèse est de voir jusqu'où ces pays sont à leur niveau optimal de taxation afin d'explorer la capacité d'amélioration que ce type de charge peut avoir dans chacun des pays de l'étude. Le risque du revenu est une autre caractéristique importante des économies en développement tels que celles trouvées en amérique latine. Etant donné leur vulnérabilité aux chocs macroéconomiques externes, ces économies ont tendance à être particulièrement volatiles. Dans ces conditions, les individus en amérique latine sont sujets à des revenus plus risques que les individus qui vivent des pays développés. La présence du risque a un effet sur comment les agents répondent aux changements divers de l'économie. C'est pourquoi, l'etude des niveaux de risque et en particulier comment les revenus plus risqués affectent la taxation optimale, est l'un des piliers de cette thèse. Le risque du revenu peut être décomposé en deux éléments, permanents ou transitoires. La dernière partie de cette thèse est consacrée à évaluer dans quelle mesure le risque de revenu présente dans chaque pays est causée par un composant permanente ou une composante temporelle. / This thesis is an applied study of optimal taxation and income risk in latin america, in particular for argentina, chile, colombia and mexico. Having to deal with high levels of income inequality, income taxation is for latin america a key tool of redistribution that until now has not been fully exploited. One of the aims of this thesis is to see how far are these countries from their optimal level of taxation, in order to explore the capacity of improvement that this type of tax may have in each one of the countries in the study. Income risk is another important characteristic of developing economies such as those found in latin america. Given their vulnerability to outside macroeconomic shocks, these economies tend to be particularly volatile. under these conditions, individuals in latin america are prone to riskier incomes than the individuals living in developed countries. The presence of risk has an effect on how the agents respond to divers changes in the economy. That is why, studying the levels of risk, and in particular how the riskier incomes affect optimal taxation, is one of the pillars of this thesis. Income risk may be decomposed into two components, permanent or transitory. The last part of this thesis is devoted to estimate how much of the income risk present in each country is caused by a permanent or a temporal component. Given the lack of panel data for latin american countries, these estimations were performed introducing pseudo-panel techniques into traditional panel data methodologies. Comparisons between pseudo-panel results and panel data results were made when the data was available.

Chapter one shows that US households with high unconditional and cyclical labor income risk are more leveraged and allocate a greater share of their financial assets to stocks. I use self-reported risk preferences to show that rational sorting of risk tolerant workers into risky employment is responsible for this otherwise puzzling result. With risk preferences accounted for, I find evidence that households with greater permanent income variance reduce leverage and stock allocations to an extent consistent with theory. However, household portfolios and employment selection do not respond significantly to any of the other three forms of labor income risk I measure: disaster risk, permanent income cyclicality, and permanent income variance cyclicality. Chapter two reports evidence that individual investors in Indian equities hold better performing portfolios as they become more experienced in the equity market. Experienced investors tilt their portfolios profitably towards value stocks and stocks with low turnover, but these tilts do not fully explain their performance. Experienced investors also tend to have lower turnover and disposition bias. These behaviors, as well as underdiversification, diminish when investors experience poor returns resulting from them, consistent with models of reinforcement learning. Furthermore, Indian stocks held by experienced, well diversified, low-turnover and low-disposition-bias investors deliver higher average returns even controlling for a standard set of stock-level characteristics. Chapter three shows that news reflected by industry stock returns is only gradually incorporated into stock prices in other countries. Information links between cross-border portfolios play a significant role in explaining variation in the speed of this incorporation; responses to industry news are rapid across borders where portfolios share more crosslistings, equity analyst coverage, and a greater common equity investor base. The drift in returns following cross-border industry news has halved in the past 25 years. About half of this change relates to a growth in information links and reductions in expropriations risks facing foreign investors. A simple long-short trading strategy designed to exploit gradual diffusion of industry news across borders appears profitable, but is unlikely to yield returns as high as the 8 to 9 percent annual rate the strategy has returned historically. / Economics

This paper examines data for 12,868 individuals from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) from 1979 through 2010 to explore certain financial incentives of marriage. In particular, this paper focuses on identifying the combination of occupations that decreases idiosyncratic income volatility to the greatest extent. For the sake of this paper, marriage is defined as the combination of two separate assets into a single portfolio. With such, I derive the efficient frontier for each occupation and gender. In the process, reward-to-volatility and mean-variance utility maximization techniques are introduced. Ultimately, applying modern portfolio theory to the marriage market allows one to examine the economic incentives of marriage in a way that has not previously been done. On the whole, the analysis confirms previous literature on marriage dynamics, while offering a new framework for analysis.

This thesis contains empirical studies of portfolio choice and asset prices. The first two chapters deal with incorporating labor supply into models traditionally only focusing on consumption. Can the risk premium on stocks be better understood when taking labor supply into account? This is the topic of the first chapter. Do possibilities of varying labor supply, and thus hedging stock market risk, help explain the stock ownership patterns of households? This question is what the second chapter tries to answer. If labor income moves with the stock market, an attempt should be made to hedge this with a lower share of stocks in the portfolio and, but do households act according to this rule? This is what the third chapter investigates. Chapter one, Labor Supply Flexibility and Portfolio Choice: Evidence from the PSID, examines the relationship between labor supply flexibility and portfolio choice. Theoretical articles have shown that, ceteris paribus, the optimal portfolio share of risky assets (stocks) increases with labor supply flexibility, due to increased possibilities of hedging financial risk by adjusting the labor supply. Using PSID household data, this hypothesis is tested using a direct measure of labor supply flexibility from survey questions. The results indicate that the total portfolio share is increased by labor supply flexibility. When separated, most of this effect seems to come from the increased probability of stock ownership due to flexible labor, rather than an increased portfolio share among stockholders. Chapter two, Can Leisure Explain the Equity Premium Puzzle? An Empirical Investigation, investigates the asset pricing properties of non-separable utility functions with consumption and leisure. The parameter restrictions needed to match the historical equity premium are explored using US data on consumption, hours and returns. Empirically, it is shown that to match the equity premium with a low level of risk aversion, consumption and leisure need to be strong complements, i.e. have a very low substitution elasticity. Chapter three, Income Risk and Stockholdings: Evidence from Swedish Microdata, examines the relationship between income risk and portfolio choice. It empirically investigates whether the stock market risk (the covariation with the stock market) in labor income is reflected by an offsetting lower share of stocks in financial portfolios, an effect that has been shown to exist in theoretical articles. Swedish microdata from HINK on households’ income and wealth are used for this purpose. In repeated cross-sections, households are divided into "portfolio cohorts" corresponding to percentiles of the share of stocks in financial assets. Income risk, i.e. the regression beta of (log) income growth on aggregate stock returns, is compared for the different groups. As predicted by theory, the results provide some support for a negative relationship between income risk and the share of stocks. / Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögsk., 2004

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In the first part of this doctoral thesis we analyse changes in old-age income risk in Germany using micro-simulation model due to changes in employment patterns and institutional reforms. We focus on the statutory pension scheme and we analyse the old-age income risk of individuals as well as of households with respect to the skill level. Our findings help to clarify the risk of post-retirement poverty for specific household constellations We find that the risk of old-age poverty will increase for almost all new pensioners in 2020-2022 compared to new pensioners in 2004-2006. Due to the characteristics of a PAYG pension system, political decision-makers have to improve labour market participation, e.g. by support the improvement of skill level. Moreover we take a closer look at the impact of the Hartz-Reforms on wages. We use panel data to estimate the effect of the structural break on wages and find strong evidence that the decrease in unemployment benefit lowered wages. Our findings show that the Hartz-Reform induced wage restraint and may also be partly responsible for the favourable labour market situation in Germany. After analysing the effect of institutional reforms on old-age income and wage, we examine whether households adjust their savings behaviour to a change in their individual unemployment, income and health expectations. We use survey panel data on German household savings and expectations. The findings suggest, in contrast to the theory of textbook models, that a higher unemployment expectation significantly decreases the (short-term) saving rate. This result may be due to labour market legislation after the Hartz-Reforms.

No description available.

In the first part of this doctoral thesis we analyse changes in old-age income risk in Germany using micro-simulation model due to changes in employment patterns and institutional reforms. We focus on the statutory pension scheme and we analyse the old-age income risk of individuals as well as of households with respect to the skill level. Our findings help to clarify the risk of post-retirement poverty for specific household constellations We find that the risk of old-age poverty will increase for almost all new pensioners in 2020-2022 compared to new pensioners in 2004-2006. Due to the characteristics of a PAYG pension system, political decision-makers have to improve labour market participation, e.g. by support the improvement of skill level. Moreover we take a closer look at the impact of the Hartz-Reforms on wages. We use panel data to estimate the effect of the structural break on wages and find strong evidence that the decrease in unemployment benefit lowered wages. Our findings show that the Hartz-Reform induced wage restraint and may also be partly responsible for the favourable labour market situation in Germany. After analysing the effect of institutional reforms on old-age income and wage, we examine whether households adjust their savings behaviour to a change in their individual unemployment, income and health expectations. We use survey panel data on German household savings and expectations. The findings suggest, in contrast to the theory of textbook models, that a higher unemployment expectation significantly decreases the (short-term) saving rate. This result may be due to labour market legislation after the Hartz-Reforms.:1 Introduction 1 1.1 Summary 3 1.2 Contribution to the literature 7 1.3 References 9 2 A Fragile Pillar: Statutory Pensions and the Risk of Old-age Poverty in Germany 11 2.1 Introduction 11 2.2 The German Statutory Pension Insurance 13 2.3 Methodology 16 2.4 Results 22 2.4.1 Male pensioners 22 2.4.2 Female pensioners 25 2.4.3 Relevance of skill 27 2.5 Sensitivity Analysis 31 2.6 Conclusion 34 2.7 References 37 2.8 Appendix 40 3 Is There a Growing Risk of Old-age Poverty in Eastern Germany? 44 3.1 Introduction 44 3.2 The German Pension System 46 3.3 Demographic Setting in Eastern Germany 48 3.4 Data and Methodology 49 3.5 Single-person Households 52 3.5.1 Males 52 3.5.2 Females 55 II 3.6 Two-Person-Households 57 3.7 Widows 62 3.8 Conclusion 64 3.9 References 65 3.10 Appendix 66 4 Unemployment Compensation and Wages: Evidence from the German Hartz-Reform 68 4.1 Introduction 68 4.2 The German Hartz-Reform 69 4.3 Data 71 4.4 Methodology 73 4.5 Results 76 4.6 Conclusions 82 4.7 References 84 4.8 Data 87 4.9 Appendix 88 5 Expectations and Saving Behavior: An Empirical Analysis 93 5.1 Introduction 93 5.2 Theoretical Discussion 95 5.3 Data 97 5.4 Empirical Strategy 100 5.5 Empirical Results 104 5.6 Conclusions 114 5.7 References 117 5.8 Data 119 5.9 Appendix 120

Die vorliegende Dissertation hat die Leerstandsrisiko-Bewertung bei einer Wohnanlagen-Sanierung zum Gegenstand. Ausgangspunkt dieser stellt die Situation auf dem Mietwohnungsmarkt in Ostdeutschland dar, der sich nach dem Ende der 90er Jahre stark verändert hat. Die neue Situation brachte ein Problem mit sich, mit dem die Wohnungsbau-Unternehmen früher kaum gerechnet haben- den Leerstand. Wird unter diesen Leerstandsbedingungen saniert, laufen die Wohnungsbau-Unternehmen die Gefahr, ihren sanierten Bestand nicht vollständig zu vermieten. Daraus resultieren etliche Probleme, die die Existenz derer aufgrund nicht eingenommener Mieten und teuerer Sanierungskosten gefährden. Um solche unwirtschaftliche Gegebenheiten zu vermeiden, ist es bei einer Wohnanlagen-Sanierung notwendig zu ermitteln, mit welchem Umfang das Leerstandsrisiko verknüpft ist und wie dem Mietausfall entgegenzuwirken ist. Auf dieser Basis liefert die Dissertation wichtige Hinweise, wie die Wohnungsbau-Unternehmen passende Sanierungsstrategien ausrichten können, um dieses ernsthafte Problem unter bestimmten Gegebenheiten zu lösen.

This thesis is divided into three chapters. In the first chapter, I identify and explore the fundamental relationship between income inequality and GDP volatility. I give theoretical insight of this relationship alongside empirical evidence from a sample of industrialized countries. In the second chapter, in regression estimates relating inequality to the variables of interest, I suggest that rather than aggregate inequality, the average growth rate of within-cohort inequality data should be used. In the light of my findings I then try to explore the effect of international trade on inequality in the US and UK. In the last chapter, I carry out a Monte Carlo study. This compares efficiencies of impulse response matching and GMM estimators at identifying reduced form coefficients and structural parameters on a DSGE model. / Esta tesis está dividida por tres capítulos. En el primer capítulo, llevo al interés que hay una relación fundamental entre la desigualdad de ingresos y la volatilidad de PBI. Doy pruebas teóricas para esta relación, así como empíricas de una muestra de países industrializados. En el segundo capítulo, sugiero que mejor que la desigualdad agregada, la tasa de crecimiento media de dentro de desigualdades de cohorte debería estar usada en las estimaciones de regresión que relaciona la desigualdad con las variables del interés. Entonces trato de explorar el efecto del comercio internacional en la desigualdad en los EE.UU y en el Reino Unido a la luz de mis conclusiones. En el último capítulo, realizo un estudio de Monte Carlo para comparar la eficiencia de la Correspondencia de respuesta de Impulso y peritos GMM en la identificación de los coeficientes de forma reducidos y parámetros estructurales en un modelo de DSGE.