Calculating the welfare implications of changes to economic policy or shocks requires economists to decide on a normative criterion. One approach is to elicit the relevant moral criteria from real-world policy choices, converting a normative decision into a positive inference, as in the recent...

As specified in Congressional bill H.R. 25/S. 25, the FairTax is a proposal to replace the federal personal income tax, corporate income tax, payroll (FICA) tax, capital gains, alternative minimum, self-employment, and estate and gifts taxes with a single-rate federal retail sales tax. The...

In estimating the effects of capital income taxation, different studies measure different effective tax rates. This paper categorizes effective tax rate estimates into six basic types, and discusses the usefulness of each. For marginal effective tax rates, some studies estimate the additional...

Each environmental tax in the U.S. is designed to collect revenue for a trust fund used to clean up a particular pollution problem. Each might be intended to collect from a particular industry thought to be responsible for that pollution problem, but none represents a good example of an...

Many, if not most, Baby Boomers appear at risk of suffering a major decline in their living standard in retirement. With federal and state government finances far too encumbered to significantly raise Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits, Boomers must look to their own devices to...

Do high taxes cause superstars to work less? We test this hypothesis using complete data on Hollywood movie stars' labor supply from 1927 to 2014. Changes to marginal tax rates in high tax brackets have no significant effect on the number of films a movie star makes each year. However, in years...

This working paper presents Chapter 7 of a book to be published for the National Bureau of Economic Research by the University of Chicago Press. The point of the book is to compare taxes on income from capital in four countries,accounting for corporate, personal, and property taxes, and...

This paper presents new evidence on the level and distribution of income and payroll tax burdens for U.S. families over the 1979-1999 period. During this period, payroll taxes have become an increasingly important component of the tax burden for many low- and middle-income families. This paper...

This paper presents new evidence on the rate of return on tangible assets in the United" States, incorporating the recently-revised national accounts as well as new estimates of the" replacement cost of the reproducible physical capital stock. The pretax return on capital in the" nonfinancial...

We find that sin good purchases are highly concentrated with 10% of households paying more than 80% of taxes on alcohol and cigarettes. Total sin tax burdens are poorly explained by demographics (including income), but are well explained by eight household clusters defined by purchasing...