tailieunhanh - The Fiscal Impact of Immigrants in Austria – A Generational Accounting Analysis

To account for the incentive alignment and the information effects of ownership concentration, we control for the level of voting rights in each firm and focus on examining how earnings informativeness is affected by the controlling owner’s entrenchment. Using the degree of divergence between voting and cash flow rights as a proxy for controlling owner entrenchment, we expect that the credibility of the firm’s accounting information and consequently the informativeness of this information to outside investors decreases with an increase in the degree to which the level of voting rights exceeds the associated level of cash flow rights. We acknowledge that even when we control for the voting. | Department of Economics Johannes Kepler University of Linz The Fiscal Impact of Immigrants in Austria - A Generational Accounting Analysis by Karin Mayr Working Paper No. 0409 July 2004 Johannes Kepler University of Linz Department of Economics Altenberger Strasse 69 A-4040 Linz - Auhof Austria phone 43 0 70 2468 -8246 -9821 fax The Fiscal Impact of Immigrants in Austria -A Generational Accounting Analysis Karin Mayr Department of Economics University of Linz July 2004 Abstract In this paper we employ generational accounting to analyse the inter-temporal stance of Austrian public finance in 1998 as well as the inter-temporal fiscal impact of immigration to Austria. Immigrants affect inter-temporal fiscal balance in essentially two ways. Firstly they have a demographic effect in enlarging the population and thus the tax base and in altering its age- and gender- composition. Secondly they change the fiscal characteristics of age cohorts due to a representative immigrant exhibiting higher or lower tax and transfer payments than a representative native of the same age and gender. The overall fiscal effect of immigration is found positive under the assumption that the age and fiscal characteristics of future immigrants resemble those of the current immigrant population in Austria. This is due to a favourable age composition and lower per capita net transfer receipts during retirement age which compensates for lower per capita net tax payments during working age. However immigration is not likely to achieve inter-temporal fiscal balance even if immigration increases or migrants are screened by skill or age. Key words immigration generational accounting fiscal imbalance. JEL codes F22 H61 E66. Contact information Karin Mayr Email Telephone 43 732 2468-8246 Fax 43 732 2468-9821 Thanks to R. Buchegger Johann K. Brunner and R. Winter-Ebmer for data support and helpful comments. 1 Introduction In the discussion on the fiscal