Conventional economic wisdom holds that the optimal level of business taxes recovers the exact cost of providing public services to businesses. I present an alternative model and derive conditions under which a self-interested decisionmaker picks tax rates to maximize an objective function that...

The Great Recession had the most severe impact on state tax revenues of any downturn since the Great Depression. We hypothesize that states with more progressive tax structures are more vulnerable to economic downturns, and that progressivity and income volatility may interact to amplify the...

NYC has the highest cigarette tax rate in the nation. Using tax stamp data from littered packs of cigarettes from a sample of randomly selected NYC census tracts, collected once before and three times after a tax increase, we find that tax evasion is high relative to the U.S., but that the...

Conventional economic wisdom holds that the optimal level of business taxes recovers the exact cost of providing public services to businesses. I present an alternative model and derive conditions under which a self-interested decisionmaker picks tax rates to maximize an objective function that...

A recent policy change caps the annual percentage increase in the assessed value of owner–occupied homes in Cook County, Illinois. Assuming that total revenue would remain constant, the result is relief for some financed by higher taxes on others. We estimate these tax burden shifts using data...

The Great Recession had the most severe impact on state tax revenues of any downturn since the Great Depression. We hypothesize that states with more progressive tax structures are more vulnerable to economic downturns, and that progressivity and income volatility may interact to amplify the...