Tax-deferred savings are potentially an important component of savings for retirement and could represent a very substantial increase in tax-free savings for many employees. IRAs may also have a substantial effect on national savings. Total IRA contributionsin 1982 were over 29 billion dollars....

This paper uses data on actual returns on taxable bonds, tax-exempt bonds, and a small sample of equity mutual funds over the 1962-1998 period to compare two asset location strategies for retirement savers. The first strategy gives priority to holding equities, through equity mutual funds, in a...

This paper shows that previous analyses of IRA-type plans have miscalculated their effect on tax revenue and therefore on national saving by ignoring their impact on corporate tax payments. Recognizing the important effect of IRA plans on corporate tax revenue changes previous conclusions about...

Recent legislative proposals have included restoring Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) to their pre-1987 eligibility rules. Whether IRAs are simply tax windfalls with no effect on saving, or whether IRAs stimulate saving, is a crucial issue in evaluating the effectiveness of such proposals....

To address the question of whether IRA5 contribute to capital formation, we use the IRS/University of Michigan taxpayer sample for income tax returns during 1980-84. By matching families across a five-year period, we can estimate the dynamic interactions of IRA purchases and other types of...

We examine the measurement of tax expenditures, as well as review issues concerning the classification of tax expenditures generally. We use calculations from NBER's TAXSIM to illustrate some of the problems with the current methodology for estimating tax expenditures. Unlike most previous work...

The philanthropic sector is highly consequential, particularly in the United States, and the most important policies directed toward this sector are tax policies. Yet most economic analysis of the optimal tax treatment of charitable giving is ad hoc, treating it as a subject unto itself. This...

This paper studies optimal taxation of entrepreneurial capital with private information and multiple assets. Entrepreneurial activity is subject to a dynamic moral hazard problem and entrepreneurs face idiosyncratic capital risk. We first characterize the optimal allocation subject to the...