Limiting tax expenditures can raise revenue without increasing marginal tax rates. Such a policy is equivalent to reducing government spending now done as subsidies through the tax code for a wide range of household spending and income. This paper explores one way of limiting tax expenditures: a...

This paper offers a possible explanation for the existence of continual government budget deficits such as experienced in a number of industrialized countries in recent years. Based on the assumption that higher tax rates cause more intensive tax-aversion behavior (tax avoidance and tax...

When Arthur Laffer or other "supply side advocates" plot total tax revenue as a function of a particular tax rate, he draws an upward sloping segment called the normal range, followed by a downward sloping segment called the prohibitive range. Since a given revenue can be obtained with either of...

This paper investigates how non-tax revenues impact tax collection in Brazilian municipalities, focusing on shifts in intergovernmental transfers due to population updates. Our analysis reveals asymmetric effects of shocks: revenue gains lead to increased spending without tax reductions, while...

Gasoline taxes can be employed to correct externalities from automobile use and to raise government revenue. Our understanding of the optimal gasoline tax and the efficacy of existing taxes is largely based on empirical analysis of consumer responses to gasoline price changes. In this paper, we...

We build a model of online behavioral manipulation driven by AI advances. A platform dynamically offers one of n products to a user who slowly learns product quality. User learning depends on a product's "glossiness,' which captures attributes that make products appear more attractive than they...

We examine the effect of consumer reviews on relative sales of books on Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com. We find that 1) reviews are overwhelmingly positive at both sites, but there are more reviews and longer reviews at Amazon.com, 2) an improvement in a book's reviews leads to an increase in...

Reputation is critical to foster trust in online marketplaces, yet leaving feedback is a public good that can be under-provided unless buyers are rewarded for it. Signaling theory implies that only high quality sellers would reward buyers for truthful feedback. We explore this scope for...

A growing body of empirical literature finds that consumers are relatively limited in how much they search over product characteristics. We assemble a dataset of search and purchase behavior from eBay to quantify the returns, and thus implied costs, to consumer search on the internet. The...

We argue that reputation mechanisms used by platform markets suffer from two problems. First, buyers may draw conclusions about the quality of the platform from single transactions, causing a reputational externality across sellers. Second, for a variety of reasons we discuss, reputations will...