In 1954, the Internal Revenue Service stipulated that employer contributions to the health insurance plans of their employees were to be excluded from employee taxable income. Today, the tax subsidy is major feature of the U.S. health care market. This paper examines the initial effects of the...

We consider the short-run responses of businesses and their owners to the introduction of Section 199A, a deduction implemented in 2018 that reduced the effective tax rate on pass-through business income. We study the deduction using several datasets derived from de-identified tax records of...

This paper tests several competing models of municipal bond market equilibrium. It analyzes the influence of changes in both personal and corporate tax reforms on the yield spread between taxable and tax-exempt interest rates. The findings suggest that changes in personal income tax rates have...

This study examines the potential effects on personal savings of alternative types of tax rules. The analysis makes use of two extensive samples of information on individual savings and financial income: the 1972 Consumer Expenditure Survey and a stratified random sample of 26,000 individual tax...

A central issue in public finance is the tradeoff between maintaining tax revenues and using the tax code to incentivize particular economic activities. One important dimension of this tradeoff is whether incentive policies are used in practice as policymakers intend. This paper examines one...

Tax policies are a wide array of tools, commonly used by governments to influence the economy. In this paper, we review the many margins through which tax policies can affect innovation, the main driver of economic growth in the long-run. These margins include the impact of tax policy on i) the...

Over three-quarters of US taxpayers receive income tax refunds, indicating tax prepayments above the level of tax liability. This amounts to a zero interest loan to the government. Previous studies have suggested two main explanations for this behavior: precautionary behavior in light of tax...

We examine the evidence on episodes of large stances in fiscal policy, both in cases of fiscal stimuli and in that of fiscal adjustments in OECD countries from 1970 to 2007. Fiscal stimuli based upon tax cuts are more likely to increase growth than those based upon spending increases. As for...

We investigate how the length of the net operating loss carryback period affects corporate liquidity and marginal tax rates. We estimate that extending the carryback period from two to five years, as recently proposed in President Obama's budget blueprint, would provide $19 ($34) billion of...