Recently, attention has focused on the estate tax. To date, however, the debate over estate taxes has been nearly devoid of standard considerations of deadweight loss. We develop a framework for computing the deadweight loss of a revenue-neutral switch from an estate tax to a capital income tax,...

What are the most efficient means of redistribution in an unequal economy? We answer this question by characterizing the optimal shape of non-linear income and wealth taxes in a dynamic general equilibrium model with uninsurable idiosyncratic risk. Our analysis reproduces the distribution of...

We provide estimates of the impact and long-run elasticities of tax base with respect to tax rates for four large U.S. cities: Houston (property taxation), Minneapolis (property taxation), New York City (property, general sales, and income taxation), and Philadelphia (property, gross receipts,...

Based on existing evidence, we know little about how the taxation of small business owners affects their economic activity. This paper studies the effect of two Finnish tax reforms, in 1997 and 1998, on the effort decisions of the owners of small businesses utilizing both theoretical model and...

This paper develops a realistic, tractable theoretical model that can be used to investigate socially-optimal capital taxation. We present a dynamic model of savings and bequests with heterogeneous random tastes for bequests to children and for wealth per se. We derive formulas for optimal tax...

Using administrative wealth records from Denmark, we study the effects of wealth taxes on wealth accumulation. Denmark used to impose one of the world's highest marginal tax rates on wealth, but this tax was drastically reduced and ultimately abolished between 1989 and 1997. Due to the specific...

In 2008, the IRS initiated efforts to curb the use of offshore accounts to evade taxes. This paper uses administrative microdata to examine the impact of the enforcement efforts on taxpayers' reporting of offshore accounts and income. Enforcement caused approximately 60,000 individuals to...

Marginal excess burden, defined as the change in deadweight loss for an additional dollar of tax revenue, has been measured for labor taxes, output taxes, and capital taxes generally. This paper points out that there is no we1 1-defined way to raise capital taxes in general, because the taxation...

Municipal governments commonly confront the problem of tardy or delinquent property tax payments. We implement an experiment in property tax collection for tardy taxpayers in the City of Philadelphia for the calendar year, 2015. The experiment sent one of seven reminder letters to the tardy...

An important goal of the desegregation of schools following the Supreme Court's decision in Brown vs. Board of Education was to improve the quality of the schools black children attended. This paper uses a new dataset to examine the effects of desegregation on public and private enrollment and...