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...

"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...

This paper uses administrative tax data to estimate top wealth in the United States. We assemble new data that links people to their sources of capital income and develop new methods to estimate the degree of return heterogeneity within asset classes. Disaggregated fixed income data reveal that...

We evaluate the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Combining reduced-form estimates from tax data with a global investment model, we estimate responses, identify parameters, and conduct counterfactuals. Domestic investment of firms with the mean tax change increases 20% versus a no-change baseline. Due...

How important is human capital at the top of the U.S. income distribution? A primary source of top income is private "pass-through" business profit, which can include entrepreneurial labor income for tax reasons. This paper asks whether top pass-through profit mostly reflects human capital,...

We argue the revenue potential from increasing tax rates on capital gains may be substantially greater than previously understood. First, many prior studies focus primarily on short-run taxpayer responses, and so miss revenue from gains that are deferred when rates change. Second, the...

Over half of the U.S. population receives health insurance through an employer, with employer premium contributions creating a flat "head tax" per worker, independent of their earnings. This paper develops and calibrates a stylized model of the labor market to explore how this uniquely American...

We assess the business provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the biggest corporate tax cut in US history. We draw five lessons. First, corporate tax revenue fell by 40 percent due to the lower rate and more generous expensing. Second, firms with larger declines in their effective tax...

This paper uses U.S. local areas as a laboratory to test whether the Great Recession depressed 2015 employment. In full-population longitudinal data, I find that exposure to a 1-percentage-point-larger 2007-2009 local unemployment shock caused working-age individuals to be 0.4 percentage points...

This paper tests whether the 2003 dividend tax cut--one of the largest reforms ever to a U.S. capital tax rate--stimulated corporate investment and increased labor earnings, using a quasi-experimental design and U.S. corporate tax returns from years 1996-2008. I estimate that the tax cut caused...