Developing countries spend vast sums on subsidies. Beneficiaries are typically selected via either a proxy-means test (PMT) or through a decentralized identification process led by local leaders. A decentralized allocation may offer informational or accountability advantages, but may be prone to...

We study the decentralization of liquor policies in the Post-Prohibition Era, which is the most famous natural experiment ever conducted with respect to policy decentralization in the U.S. Our empirical analysis exploits a unique feature of this policy change, namely that we observe votes of...

Education policy, while primarily the responsibility of the state governments, involves complicated decision making at the local, state, and federal levels. The federal involvement dramatically increased with the introduction of test-based accountability under the No Child Left Behind Act of...

This paper studies the coevolution of the fall in the US corporate sector labor share and the rise of business activity in tax-preferred, pass-through form. Reallocating activity to the form it would have taken prior to the Tax Reform Act of 1986 accounts for one third of the decline in the...

The 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act reduced the US corporate tax rate and introduced provisions to curb profit shifting. We combine survey data, tax data, and firm financial statements to study the evolution of the geographical allocation of US firms' profits after the reform. The share of profits...

This paper reviews recent empirical research studying the impact of the U.S. corporate income tax on the behavior of firms. Four areas are discussed:(1) The extent to which dividend taxation imposes a "double tax" on corporate source earnings;(2) The historical impact of tax incentives on the...

This paper investigates the impact of changes in the level of taxation on economic activity. We use the narrative record -- presidential speeches, executive-branch documents, and Congressional reports -- to identify the size, timing, and principal motivation for all major postwar tax policy...

This paper examines the employment effects of the earned income tax credit (EITC). We use a unique dataset, created by matching administrative data from public assistance records, unemployment insurance records, and federal tax returns for a sample of California residents. We conduct a set of...

This paper employs MIMIC, an applied general equilibrium model of the Dutch economy, to explore various tax cuts aimed at combating unemployment and raising labor supply. MIMIC combines modern labor-market theories, a firm empirical foundation detailed description of Dutch labor-market...