We examine who bears the costs of mandated workplace pension programs, exploiting the quasi-experimental rollout of automatic enrollment in the UK. Total compensation (take-home pay plus employer contributions) increases, driven by employer contributions, while the amount of take-home pay...

Using a Difference-in-Differences approach we evaluate the effects of a 10 percentage points reduction in the payroll tax introduced in 2002 for firms in the northern part of Sweden. We find no employment effects for existing firms and can rule out that a 1 percentage point payroll tax reduction...

Employers' standard practice of including legal spouses in health insurance is likely to place people in unmarried couples at a significant disadvantage for obtaining coverage. Data from married and unmarried couples in the Current Population Survey confirm that people with unmarried partners...

For more than 25 years, the Social Security Trust Fund has been projected to run out of money in 2033 (give or take a few years), potentially causing benefits to be severely reduced in the absence of corrective legislative action. Today (February 2024), projections are made by the Social...

Retirement savings abandonment is a rising concern connected to defined contribution systems and default enrollment. We use tax data on Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) to establish that for a recent cohort, 0.4% of retirement-age individuals abandoned an aggregate of $66 million, proxied...

We use employment data from the Current Population Survey to assess the efficacy of state-mandated paid sick leave policies on leave-taking behavior with a focus on any variation by gender. We find that these policies increase leave taking for care-giving for men by 10-20%, and this effect is...

In 2008, the Swedish property tax was reformed and a cap on yearly tax liabilities was introduced. A large fraction of owner occupied houses was subject to a substantial decrease in the tax. When the reform was announced, most analysts projected - in line with tax capitalization theory - that...

This paper uses store-level data on consumer liquor revenues and volume sales in Oregon to estimate the effect of state tax differentials on consumer demand. Liquor privatization in Washington led to higher prices from new taxes. I calculate the impact of tax incidence on tax avoidance using...

The Tax Cut and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) made significant changes to corporate and personal federal income taxation, including limiting the SALT (state and local property, income and sales taxes) deductibility to $10,000. States with high SALT tend to vote Democratic. This paper estimates the...

We analyze price responses to large restaurant VAT rate reductions in two different European countries. Our results show that responses in the short and medium run were clustered around two focal points of zero passthrough and full pass-through. Differences between independent restaurants and...