We examine the effect of air quality regulation on the productivity of some of the most heavily regulated manufacturing plants in the United States, the oil refineries of the Los Angeles (South Coast) Air Basin. We use direct measures of local air pollution regulation in this region to estimate...

This paper analyzes the effects of tax policy on the strategic choices of a domestic multinational company competing with a foreign multinational company in a third country. We demonstrate the role of the effective average tax rate and the effective marginal tax rate on the company's choices. We...

Conventional wisdom holds that lack of government commitment deters foreign investment in developing countries. Yet this explanation is not convincing because some econometric studies have found little support for the role of political risk and host governments can offer upfront subsidies that...

One recurring issue in the debate over the estate tax is its impact on the non-profit sector. With the top marginal rate of federal estate tax currently at 49 percent, abolishing the tax would approximately double the price of a charitable bequest relative to an ordinary bequest for the...

Entrepreneurial activity is presumed to generate important spillovers, potentially justifying tax subsidies. How does the tax law affect individual incentives? How much of an impact has it had in practice? We first show theoretically that taxes can affect the incentives to be an entrepreneur due...

Why do governments employ inefficient policies to redistribute income towards special interest groups (SIGs) when more efficient ones are available? To address this puzzle we derive and test predictions for a set of policies where detailed data is available and an efficiency ranking is feasible:...

We consider the efficiency implications of policies to reduce global carbon emissions in a world with pre-existing tax distortions. We first note that the weak double-dividend, the proposition that the welfare improvement from a tax reform where environmental taxes are used to lower distorting...

There has been a pronounced change in the formulas states use to apportion the income of multistate corporations from one that placed equal weight on payroll, profits, and sales to one that places at least half the weight on sales, and eight base apportionment solely on sales. This paper, which...

Do societies choose inefficient policies and institutions, in contrast to what would be suggested by a reasoning extending the Coase Theorem to politics? Do societies choose inefficient policies and institutions because of differences in the beliefs and ideologies of their peoples or leaders? Or...

This paper discusses how the effects of taxes on economic behavior are important for revenue estimation, for calculating efficiency effects, and for understanding short-term macroeconomoic consequences. The primary focus is on taxes on labor income but some attention is given to taxes on income...