A law issued to combat political corruption and Mafia infiltration of city councils in Italy has resulted in episodes of large, unanticipated, temporary contractions in local public spending. Using these episodes as instruments, we estimate the output multiplier of spending cuts at provincial...

We use a simple theory of a system of cities to decompose the determinants of the city size distribution into three main components: efficiency, amenities, and frictions. Higher efficiency and better amenities lead to larger cities but also to greater frictions through congestion and other...

I consider optimal nonlinear taxation of income and bequests with a joy-of-giving bequest motive and explicitly characterize the optimal estate tax rate. The optimal formula trades off correction of externality from giving and discouraging effort of children due to income effect generated by...

The strong dislike evidenced by the American public towards the estate tax suggests that the wealthy wish to transfer resources to their heirs tax-free and would thus exploit mechanisms allowing them to reduce the tax burden whenever possible. However, I find strong evidence that the wealthy...

We estimate the sensitivity of Internet retail purchasing to sales taxes using eBay data. Our first approach exploits the fact that a seller's location?and therefore the applicable tax rate?is revealed only after a buyer has expressed interest in an item. We document how adverse tax "surprises"...

We show that the week after selling a large-prize Texas Lotto winning ticket, a retailer experiences a 12 to 38 percent relative increase in ticket sales. Some increase persists for up to 40 weeks. We document that the sales response increases with jackpot size and is larger in areas with more...

Using two strategies, we show that consumers underreact to taxes that are not salient. First, using a field experiment in a grocery store, we find that posting tax-inclusive price tags reduces demand by 8 percent. Second, increases in taxes included in posted prices reduce alcohol consumption...

This paper evaluates the effect of estate taxes on labor supply. The analysis decomposes the effect of estate taxation into the substitution effect of relative price changes and the two income effects for which the estate tax is responsible. These two income effects arise from tax burdens on...

When the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates binds, monetary policy cannot provide appropriate stimulus. We show that, in the standard New Keynesian model, tax policy can deliver such stimulus at no cost and in a time-consistent manner. There is no need to use inefficient policies such as...

We estimate how durable expenditures respond to government spending shocks at different points in the business cycle using a nonlinear VAR approach that allows for the durable multiplier to vary smoothly with the state of the economy. We find strong evidence that the aggregate durable spending...