We document that, during the COVID-19 era, the inflation expectations of Democrats remained strongly anchored, while those of Republicans did not. Republicans' expectations not only rose well above the inflation target, but also became more sensitive to a variety of shocks, including CPI...

We explore the evolution of income inequality and mobility in the U.S. for a large number of subnational groups defined by race and ethnicity, using granular statistics describing income distributions, income mobility, and conditional income growth derived from the universe of tax filers and W-2...

We study habit formation in annual biometric health screenings using a field experiment that randomly assigned financial incentives to 4,799 employees over three years. Completing the first screening raised subsequent screenings by 32.4-36.0 percentage points (84%-90%) annually. Habit formation...

This paper shows that the usual excess-burden triangle' formula performs poorly when used to assess the excess burden from taxes on intermediate inputs or consumer goods, and derives a practical alternative to this formula. We use an analytically tractable general equilibrium model to reveal how...

The purpose of this paper is to present the chronological development ofthe concept of excess burden and the related study of optimal tax theory. A main objective of this exercise is to uncover the interrelationships among various apparently distinct results, so as to bring out the basic...

A lifetime perspective is appropriate in assessing the welfare implications of government tax policies. Although a number of attempts have been made to ex- amine the excess burden of taxation in life-cycle models, these have tended to ignore the role of human capital accumulation and/or the...

It is well understood that a tax which distorts relative prices generates a welfare cost or "excess burden" in addition to any associated transfer of resources, but there remains considerable controversy and confusion with respect to procedures for measuring this excess burden. The purpose of...

Central to the welfare analysis of income transfer programs is the deadweight loss associated with possible reforms. To aid analytical tractability, its measurement typically requires specifying a simplified model of behavior. We employ a complementary "decomposition" approach that compares the...

This paper studies commodity taxation in a general model featuring imperfect competition and tax salience. We derive new formulas for the incidence and marginal excess burden of commodity taxation, and we estimate the necessary inputs to the formulas by combining Nielsen Retail Scanner data from...

The fraction of GDP devoted to health care in the United States is the highest in the world and rising rapidly. Recent economic studies have highlighted the growing value of health improvements, but less attention has been paid to the efficiency costs of tax-financed spending to pay for such...