In the United States wealth is highly concentrated and very unequally distributed: the richest 1% hold one third of the total wealth in the economy. Understanding the determinants of wealth inequality is a challenge for many economic models. We summarize some key facts about the wealth...

Yes, it did. We use exogenous variation in banks' incentives to conform to the standards of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) around regulatory exam dates to trace out the effect of the CRA on lending activity. Our empirical strategy compares lending behavior of banks undergoing CRA exams...

A central justification for social insurance and for other policies aimed at retirement savings is that individuals may fail to make adequate provision during their working years. Much research has focused on myopia and other behavioral limitations. Yet little attention has been devoted to how...

This paper uses the interwar period in the United States as a laboratory for investigating the incentive effects of changes in marginal income tax rates. Marginal rates changed frequently and drastically in the 1920s and 1930s, and the changes varied greatly across income groups at the top of...

We study optimal labor and savings distortions in a lifecycle model with idiosyncratic shocks. We show a tight connection between its recursive formulation and a static Mirrlees model with two goods, which allows us to derive elasticity-based expressions for the dynamic optimal distortions. We...

Over 18 million taxpayers are projected to receive the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) in tax year 1997, at a total cost to the federal government of about 25 billion dollars. The EITC is refundable, so that any amount of the credit exceeding the family's tax liability is returned in the form of...

We estimate the elasticity of charitable giving with respect to its price and after-tax income using a panel of over 550,000 disproportionately high-income tax returns spanning the years 1979 through 2005. Improvements relative to the previous literature include: using state tax variation to...

This paper describes the current estate and gift tax rules that apply to intergenerational transfers in the United States. It summarizes the incentives for inter vivos giving as a strategy for reducing estate tax liability. It shows that the current level of intergenerational transfers is much...

Recent estimates of the potential growth effects of tax reform vary widely, ranging from zero (Lucas 1990) to eight percentage points (Jones, Manuelli, and Rossi 1993). Using an endogenous growth model, we assess which model features and parameter values are important for determining the...

This paper uses the Tax Reform Act of 1986 as a natural experiment to identify the labor supply responsiveness of married women to changes in the tax rate. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 reduced the top marginal tax rate by 44 percent (from 50 percent to 28 percent), but changed less the marginal...