Taxes on executive bonuses, financial transactions and excess profits are a few of the taxes proposed or enacted to punish banks for their role in the recent financial crisis.
But most of these ideas have shortcomings, a U-M economist says.
“A number of potentially complicated and ambitious new taxes on the financial sector are currently being discussed,” says Joel Slemrod, professor of economics and the Paul W. McCracken Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business. “While the recent financial crisis shows how important it is to consider whether such instruments might help to improve incentives, reform efforts should not unduly focus on the exotic and new at the expense of the familiar and old.
“Addressing undesirable incentives within the existing income tax may be as or more important as creating new tax instruments.”
Slemrod and colleagues Douglas Shackelford of the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School and Daniel Shaviro of the New York University Law School examine the role of taxation in the financial sector in a new study published this month in the National Tax Journal.
They say that even if fairly well-designed tax instruments are adopted, the key incentive problem that gave rise to the financial crisis — excessive risk-taking by firms and managers that did not face the entire downside — likely will remain.
As a result, government regulation of the banking and finance industry will continue to be necessary, the researchers say.
“Expected social harm, other than the purely pecuniary to the government as insurer, is multidimensional and difficult to measure,” Slemrod says. “And even that pecuniary harm cannot be measured entirely accurately through a risk-adjusted fee. Thus, the classic tax-or-regulation debate is surely beside the point with respect to financial institutions, because regulation of the financial sector both is not going away and should not.”
Slemrod and colleagues say, however, that new tax instruments might conceivably be part of the regulatory response to lessons learned about how to reduce the chance of future crises — despite some skepticism regarding their efficacy.
Proponents of a financial transactions tax, for example, say it would increase the costs of financial asset transactions, thereby reducing speculative and technical trading that increases financial markets’ volatility and susceptibility to bubbles. The researchers say, however, that little evidence exists to support the claim that an increase in transaction costs generally improves market functioning.
