Beispiel 22 - Department of Economics

Beispiel 22
Studieren Sie den Beitrag aus der New York Times vom 14. April
2002 und beantworten Sie die folgenden Fragen:
1.
Warum dürfte eine Zigarettensteuer eher die Armen und die
Mittelklasse als die Reichen treffen, im Vergleich zu einer
Einkommensteuer oder Grundsteuer?
2.
Stellen Sie kurz dar, auf welche Weise die zitierte Studie zum
Schluss kommt, dass eine Steuer auf Zigaretten den Besteuerten
hilft.
3.
Erörtern Sie kurz, ob Raucher rational über ihren
Zigarettenkonsum entscheiden.
April 14, 2002
How a Tax on Cigarettes Can Help The Taxed
By DAVID LEONHARDT
The people who run the country's cities and states seem to have developed a
new philosophy of government: when cash is short, hit up the smokers for
more money.
In New York, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg wants to raise the city's cigarette
tax to $1.50 a pack, from just 8 cents. Knowing that most Americans' distaste
for smoking outweighs their skepticism of new taxes, politicians from other
states, including New Jersey and Connecticut, have made similar proposals in
recent months.
But this approach has its own difficulties. A just society should not solve its
problems by creating a group of pariahs and then overtaxing them. If the
government does not have enough money to run its programs, one wonders if
it should either rein in its ambitions or increase taxes for everybody.
Also, raising cigarette taxes instead of income or real-estate taxes, as Mayor
Bloomberg wants to do, seems likely to hurt the poor and the middle class, who
spend a greater portion of their income on cigarettes than the wealthy do.
But to a rapidly emerging field of economics, this analysis is all wrong. These
economists make the counterintuitive argument that increasing cigarette taxes helps
smokers more than anyone else.
To understand their position, start by thinking about the smokers you know (or
yourself, if you are among the 20 percent or so of Americans who smoke). The
chances are good that they have often said they would like to quit, and some have
probably tried to do so more than once. In the end, though, short-term desire, or
addiction, tended to trump long-term happiness.
For years, economists would have said that actions speak louder than words.
Whatever smokers say about quitting, they are rationally deciding that the pleasure
they derive from cigarettes exceeds their cost.
Jonathan Gruber was one of these economists when he worked in the Treasury
Department in the Clinton administration. Mr. Gruber, a professor at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, remembers telling other policy makers that
economic theory says they should not increase cigarette taxes. People should be
allowed to decide for themselves whether they want to smoke, he told his
colleagues. Those who smoke may hurt themselves, but they will not drain the
country's resources because so many of them will die before running up large
Medicare bills.
Mr. Gruber called it his most embarrassing moment in government, and his
discomfort with his own argument caused him to begin researching the issue when
he returned to academia. The central question is whether smokers really do
rationally weigh the pluses and minuses of smoking, as traditional economics
would suggest.
TO find an answer, Mr. Gruber and Sendhil Mullainathan, another M.I.T.
economist, studied surveys of Americans' and Canadians' reported happiness over
the last 30 years. These surveys have become popular in the hot field of behavioral
economics, whose followers say human beings do not always make rational
choices.
Mr. Gruber and Mr. Mullainathan used about 10 variables that are correlated with
smoking, including age, income, household size and religious observance, to
identify who the smokers in the survey were — thus catching former smokers as
well. The two also collected data on changes in cigarette taxes in the United States
and Canada.
While controlling for other variables, the two economists found that after cigarette
taxes increased, unhappiness declined among the smoking subset, indicating that
they had quit or cut down smoking and were pleased about it. The taxes are also
less regressive than they appear, because poorer smokers are more likely to quit
when the price increases.
Researchers already know that smokers are price-sensitive. Studies show that a
10 percent price increase produces about a 5 percent drop in smoking. The new
work — available at http://econ-www.mit.edu/faculty/gruberj/ — shows that
taxes push people to take a step they had wanted to take before but couldn't.
"We all know smokers who really want to quit, but there is nothing in the private
market that can force them to quit," Mr. Gruber said. "The government can
provide that."
Some smokers, to be sure, do not want to quit, and they receive no benefit from
higher taxes. But society still might. The Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention said last week that the current level of cigarette taxes was not high
enough to pay for the health problems caused by smoking.
The beauty of cigarette taxation is that it is among the few public policies that
can both raise revenue and cut costs.
Beispiel 23
Die privaten Grenzkosten der Unternehmen für die Produktion eines
Gutes lassen sich durch die Gleichung GK(x) = 0,2 x beschreiben (x
ist die Menge des Gutes). Die marginale Zahlungsbereitschaft der
Konsumenten folgt der Beziehung MZB(x) = 2.000 – 0,1x. Pro Einheit
des produzierten Gutes fallen externe Grenzkosten in Höhe von 20
an. Welches Gleichgewicht (Menge, Preis) ergibt sich auf den Markt
ohne Berücksichtigung des externen Effekts? Was ist die effiziente
Menge?
Hinweis: Nehmen Sie einen Wettbewerbsmarkt an, bei dem die
Nachfragekurve gleich der inversen MZB-Kurve ist (also x =
(2.000-p)/0,1; dabei bezeichnet p den Preis) und die Angebotskurve
gleich der inversen Grenzkostenkurve.
Beispiel 24
Die Grenzkosten der Produktion eines Gutes (x bezeichnet dessen
Menge) lassen sich (aggregiert) durch die Funktion GK(x) = 1 + 0,1x
beschreiben. Die (aggregierte) Kurve der marginalen
Zahlungsbereitschaft sei MZB(x): 10 - 0,2 x.
a) Berechnen Sie das Marktgleichgewicht.
Außerdem entstehen durch den Konsum des Gutes externe (marginale)
Vorteile von 3 pro weiterer Einheit.
b) Berechnen Sie die effiziente Menge.