Lei Sandy Ye's research while affiliated with World Bank and other places

Under economies with hyperbolic preferences, vast research has investigated welfare‐improving tax policies to resolve capital misallocation issues. In this paper, we suggests an alternative channel to overcome a form of this issue associated with consumer's present bias—optimism, as defined by overexpectation of future productivity. We show that even though optimism negatively impacts consumers under normal circumstances, a moderate level of it can be beneficial when consumers have hyperbolic preferences. On the other hand, pessimism always negatively impacts consumer welfare. A steady‐state analysis shows that the quantitative impact of optimism on welfare can be sizable.

Two major forms of corporate tax policies are dividend and profits taxes. Based on conventional corporate theory, these tax policies distort the firm's investment decisions and decrease firm value. However, this paper shows that under hyperbolically discounted preferences, dividend taxation is capable of boosting firm investment in a value‐enhancing way. The hyperbolically discounted present value can be interpreted as reflecting irrational myopic preferences or, as we demonstrate, reduced‐form implications of corporate agency issues. Both cases result in an underinvestment problem for the firm, but the firm valuation criteria differ. The optimal taxation issue is discussed under a Cobb–Douglas production function setting.

We present a parametric example of three-country advantageous redistribution with two Cobb-Douglas utility functions and one CES utility function for which the elasticity of substitution is 1/2. This paper indicates that the possibility of advantageous redistribution strongly depends on the three countries’ taste patterns, endowment distributions, and the elasticity of substitution. In particular, we will show with specific examples that greater difference between the donor and recipient’s taste patterns and a lower elasticity of substitution can increase the chance of advantageous redistribution.

The motivation of our paper comes from David Gale’s seminal work in 1974. He constructed an example of the “transfer paradox” based on three Leontief functions. The transfer paradox is that when there is a set of agents in the home country and that the home country is trading with other countries, then certain public lump-sum tax transfer plans could make all agents in the home country better off. Our contributions are as follows. First, we show that such an example can be constructed with three smooth CES utility functions. Secondly, we establish the three crucial conditions for the existence of the transfer paradox: (1) The donor (a taxpayer) has stronger preferences for the foreign good than the recipient; (2) The donor is ex-ante wealthier than the recipient; (3) The elasticity of substitution of the foreign country’s preference is strictly less than one.