In the United States, there are 741 billionaires with a combined net worth of $5.2 trillion. These billionaires live highly public lives, with some achieving superstar status. Despite growing inequality, billionaires face effective tax rates lower than the average American. Is this due to a lack...

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...

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...

We use data from the U.S. Treasury corporate tax files for 1984 and 1992 to address two related questions concerning the investment decisions of U.S. multinational corporations. How sensitive are investment location decisions to tax rate differences across countries, and have investment location...

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...

"Pass-through" businesses like partnerships and S-corporations now generate over half of U.S. business income and account for much of the post-1980 rise in the top- 1% income share. We use administrative tax data from 2011 to identify pass-through business owners and estimate how much tax they...

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...

The increased burden of disclosure and governance regulations is often cited as a key reason for the significant decline in the number of publicly-listed companies in the U.S. We explore the connection between regulatory costs and the number of listed firms by exploiting a regulatory quirk: many...

We use machine learning to analyze minute-by-minute Bloomberg online status data and study how the effort provision of top executives in public corporations affects firm value. While executives likely spend most of their time doing other activities, Bloomberg usage data allows us to characterize...

Legal records indicate that conflicts of interest -- that is, situations in which officers and directors were in a position to benefit themselves at the expense of minority shareholders -- were endemic to corporations in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century U.S. Yet investors...