In 1996 Austria introduced a tax for the layoff of older workers, which was tightened in 2000. The regulation requires employers to pay a tax of up to 170 percent of the gross monthly income when they give notice to employees aged 50 or more. We use data from Austrian social security records to...

The United Kingdom employed the McKenna rule to conduct fiscal policy during World War I (WWI) and the interwar period. Named for Reginald McKenna, Chancellor of the Exchequer (1915–16), the McKenna rule committed the United Kingdom to a path of debt retirement, which we show was...

We use information from the tax returns of U.S. multinational corporations to address three questions related to tax competition. First, does tax competition or company tax planning behavior better explain recent decreases in the local effective tax rates faced by U.S. multinationals investing...

In this paper, I first summarize how the US Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) operates and describe the characteristics of recipients. I then discuss empirical work on the effects of the EITC on poverty and income distribution, and its effects on labor supply. Next, I discuss a few policy concerns...

I analyze how lack of commitment affects the maturity structure of sovereign debt. Governments balance benefits of default induced redistribution and costs due to income losses in the wake of a default. Their choice of short- versus long- term debt affects default and rollover decisions by...

I argue that by hiring former legislators firms can impact the enforcement of rules. I test the argument with data on firm-level taxes and the IRS's enforcement activities. I compile a database of publicly listed firms, which have hired Members of Congress (MCs) in the period 2004-2015. I show...

This paper reports the results of experiments designed to examine whether a taste for fairness affects people’s preferred tax structure. Building on the Fehr and Schmidt (1999) model, we devise a simple test for the presence of social preferences in voting for alternative tax structures. The...

The U.S. tax policy on health insurance favors only those offered a group insurance through their employers. This policy is highly regressive since the subsidy takes the form of deductions from the progressive tax system. The paper investigates alternatives to the current policy. We find that...

Focusing on tax policy with incomplete asset markets, we create a framework for proving the existence of Pareto improving taxes, for computing them, and for bounding the improvement. The protagonist is the price adjustment following an intervention. If the price adjustment is sufficiently...