Using discontinuities in housing transaction taxes in New York and New Jersey we find robust price bunching. Incidence for transactions local to the notch falls on sellers, with no evidence of evasion. The volume of missing transactions above the notch exceeds those bunching (beyond the usual...

State borders create a discontinuous tax treatment of retail sales. In a Nash game, local tax rates will be higher on the low state tax side of a border. Local taxes will decrease from the nearest high-tax border and increase from the low-tax border. Using driving time from state borders and all...

Data on memory modules sales are used to explore aspects of e-retail demand. Aggregate sales are examined in state-level regressions. Discrete choice techniques are used to examine (incomplete) hourly sales data from a price comparison site. We find a strong relationship between e-retail sales...

The large tax differentials between Chicago and neighboring jurisdictions provide an incentive for cigarette tax avoidance. Data from a random sample of cigarette packs littered in Chicago reveals a startling degree of tax avoidance: three-quarters did not display a Chicago tax stamp. Also, the...

Recent evidence suggests consumers pay less attention to commodity taxes levied at the register than to taxes included in a good's posted price. If this attention gap is larger for high-income consumers than for low-income consumers, policymakers can manipulate a tax's regressivity by altering...

We present an empirical test for the addictiveness of lottery gambling that exploits an exogenous shock to local market consumption of lottery gambling. It uses the sale of a winning jackpot ticket in a zip code as an instrument for present consumption and tests for a causal relationship between...

This paper studies Comprehensive Performance Assessment, an explicit incentive scheme for local government in England. Motivated by a theoretical political agency model, we predict that CPA should increase service quality and local taxation, but have an ambiguous effect on the efficiency of...

During the last quarter of 2008, financial losses in state pension funds varied from 12 percent to 68 percent of the revenue generated by the state government. We quantify a sovereign default channel in the state municipal market by examining how changes in bond spreads vary with state pension...

This paper investigates competition between jurisdictions in the context of cross-border shopping for state lottery tickets. Our theoretical model, in which consumers consider both travel costs and lottery payoffs, predicts that per-resident sales should be more responsive to prices in small...

We use Nielsen Homescan data to examine who bears the economic burden of cigarette taxes. We find cigarette taxes are less than fully passed through to consumer prices, suggesting consumers and producers split the excess burden of these taxes. Using information on consumer location, we show the...