Given the increasing use of stock options in executive compensation, we examine how taxes influence the choice of compensation and document that income deferral is an important margin of adjustment in response to tax rate changes. To account for this option in the empirical analysis, we explore...

dramatically with aggregate annuity purchases reaching $159.3 billion in 1995. While many annuities are job-related, by 1994 individual annuity purchases outside of job-related retirement plans had grown to $51 billion. This paper uses state-level data on annuity premiums for 1984-93 to explore...

It has now been nearly three decades since the publication of two important volumes that laid out many of the details of how one might implement a progressive consumption tax (Institute for Fiscal Studies, 1978; U.S. Treasury, 1977). Over the years since, many contributions have analyzed the...

Knowing the elasticity of taxable income (ETI) is crucial for understanding the effects of taxation on taxpayer behavior and consequently on tax revenues. Previous research finds that high-income individuals are the most sensitive to tax policy changes. However, these individuals have more...

Using the TAXSIM model for the period 1962-95, we consider the federal tax system's impact as an automatic stabilizer. Despite the many changes in the tax system, there has been relatively little change in its role as an automatic stabilizer. We estimate that individual federal taxes offset...

As a tax base, 'consumption' is sometimes argued to be less fair than 'income' because the benefits of not taxing capital income accrue to high-income households. We argue that, despite the common perception that consumption taxation eliminates all taxes on capital income, consumption and income...

In this paper, we propose a new measure of horizontal equity that overcomes many of the shortcomings of previous proposed measures. Our starting point is the observation that a well-behaved social welfare function need not evaluate global' (vertical equity) differences in after-tax income using...