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...

Federal tax policy provides a broad array of incentives for energy investment. I review those policies and construct estimates of marginal effective tax rates for different energy capital investments as of 2007. Effective tax rates vary widely across investment classes. I then consider...

The U.S. Congress is considering a set of bills designed to limit the nation's greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This paper complements the analysis by Paltsev et al. (2007) of cap-and-trade bills and applies the MIT Emissions Prediction and Policy Analysis (EPPA) model to carry out an analysis of...

Tax expenditures are a major source of support for energy related activities in the federal budget exceeding direct budget support for energy by a factor of nearly six. Focusing on the policy goals of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and petroleum consumption, I find these tax expenditures...

On Aug. 8, 2005, President Bush signed the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (PL 109-58). This was the first major piece of energy legislation enacted since 1992 following five years of Congressional efforts to pass energy legislation. Among other things, the law contains tax incentives worth over $14...

This paper investigates the effect of specific features of the U.S. capital gains tax on turn-of-the-year stock returns. It focuses on two tax changes. The first, enacted in 1969, reduced the fraction of long-term losses that were deductible from Adjusted Gross Income from 100 percent to 50...

In models with irreversible investment, increasing uncertainty about prices has been shown to increase the required rate of return (hurdle rate) and delay investment (e.g., Pindyck, 1988). One serious form of uncertainty faced by firms, a form that policy makers could conceivably control, is tax...

This paper sketches how the tax reforms of the 1980s affected the incentives and distortions associated with tax policy toward housing markets. There are three principal conclusions. (1) Reductions in marginal tax rates, particularly for high-income households, reduced the tax-induced distortion...