This article conducts two investigations — searching historical documents and testing the conclusions drawn with an econometric model of policy adoption — into why federal and state governments began offering senior income tax breaks. Such tax breaks began by accident but their existence...

Recent research has shown that a state’s overall tax burden is dependent on that of neighboring states. By disaggregating a state’s tax burden into its individual components, this paper demonstrates that during the period of 1967–1996, state taxes with a mobile tax base had positive...

Researchers and practitioners hypothesize that the elderly may move to avoid paying “death” (estate, inheritance and gift, or EIG) taxes. Past research on elderly migration, however, has been based on cross–sectional data. Cross–sectional analyses may be misleading as many states that...

Over the last 40 years, state income tax breaks targeting the elderly have grown, often justified by arguments that the elderly move across state lines in response to such tax preferences. Using two complementary sources of elderly migration data and several measures of elderly income tax...

A study of the effect over time of the differential tax treatment of married and unmarried taxpayers. Measures the rate at which females marry and the timing of marriages, but finds no support for the assertion that the marriage tax negatively affects the timing of marriages.

We estimate the costs of performing property tax as-sessments using a translog cost function over a sample of 138 county-level assessment offices in Georgia. We find that there are substantial economies of scale. For example, computed at the sample means, a ten percent increase in the volume of...