Hidden Baggage: Behavioral Responses to Changes in Airline Ticket Tax Disclosure

We examine the impact of a January 2012 enforcement action by the US Department of Transportation that required US air carriers and online travel agents to modify their web interfaces to incorporate all ticket taxes in up-front, advertised fares. We show that the more prominent display of tax-inclusive prices is associated with significant reductions in consumer tax incidence, demand, and ticket revenues along more heavily taxed itineraries. In particular, the fraction of unit taxes that airlines passed onto consumers fell by roughly 75 cents for every dollar of tax. These results present evidence of consumer inattention in a novel institutional setting featuring quasi-experimental variation in tax salience, economically significant tax amounts, and endogenous price responses. (JEL D91, H22, H25, H31, L84, L93)

Tax efficiency in a model of endogenous markups

Efficiency comparison of ad valorem and unit taxes has been traditionally based on consumer welfare. However, if the tax instrument also affects the distribution of firms over their productivities, the policy maker may be concerned about the implications on aggregate productivity as well. This paper makes an efficiency comparison of ad valorem and unit taxes by allowing the distribution of firms to respond to changes in policy. First, I make an efficiency comparison in a model with monopolistically competitive firms that are homogenous with respect to their productivity levels. Consumer preferences exhibit love for variety and allow firms to adjust their markups. I find that ad valorem tax is more efficient. Allowing for firm heterogeneity overturns this result at high revenue requirements. As the tax rate increases, ad valorem tax causes excessive exit of firms which makes the market more competitive. Hence, few surviving firms price lower by decreasing their markups. Lower prices decrease the tax revenue collected. As a result under ad valorem tax regime, higher consumer surplus is dominated by lower tax revenue. On the other hand, production is concentrated among relatively more productive firms. Thus, aggregate productivity is higher under ad valorem tax regime.

Comparison of social and perceived marginal costs of road transport in Italy

The topic of external costs of transport is widely studied in the scientific literature and policy makers are showing a growing awareness on this problem. One of the main tools used to control the social costs of transport and reduce welfare losses associated to externalities is that of internalisation via tariffs: road pricing, carbon taxes, dedicated taxes etc. Actually, many taxes on transport already exist, but seldom have an explicit internalisation purpose. In this paper we compare current road transport perceived marginal costs in Italy with social ones. Starting from the literature on the topic, in the analytical part of the paper we present the case of Italy and quantify the current level of external costs and taxation. Then we compare unit taxes with marginal transport social costs, with particular respect to different driving contexts. Results show that gasoline passengers cars always perceive the external costs they generate more than any other vehicle category. In urban contexts external costs are still not rightly perceived, with the exception of recent gasoline cars only and excluding congestion. Outside urban contexts, the perceived share is considerably higher. Estimates also suggest that a distortion exists with respect to the gap between highway tolls and infrastructure damage costs in Italy: trucks pay only a little more than marginal infrastructure costs they generate, so that only cars are actually paying for new investments.

A behavioral and welfare analysis of progressive forest taxation

We use the Hartman rotation model to study behavioral and social welfare effects of forest tax progression. The following new results are shown for harvest and timber taxes. First, a tax-revenue neutral increase in the timber tax rate, compensated by a higher tax exemption, will shorten the optimal private rotation age. A sufficient condition for this to hold for the yield and unit taxes is that the marginal valuation of amenities is nondecreasing with the age of the forest stand. Second, for the socially optimal forest taxation, if society can use the neutral site productivity tax to collect tax revenue, the proportional forest tax is enough to internalize the externality caused by private harvesting. Finally, even though site productivity tax is not available, the tax structure should be designed so that tax exemption is neutral, implying that the optimal corrective forest taxes remain unchanged.