In recent decades, governments around the world have increasingly used various forms of state aid to try to attract and retain the business activity of foreign-owned multinational corporations. Yet, in most cases, this "commercialisation of state sovereignty" (Palan, 2002) has failed to catalyse...

Self-employed individuals have arguably greater opportunities than wage earners to underreport their incomes. The incentives for underreporting should be especially strong in an economy with generally high taxes. This paper uses recent income and expenditure data to examine the extent of...

Phoenix and neighboring municipalities, like many in the South and West, pursued a growth strategy based on annexation in the decades after World War II. This paper explores the link between annexation and competition for tax revenues. After discussing arguments for annexation, it traces the...

We describe the simple analytics of the four main types of sales taxes under revenue neutrality: the retail sales tax, the value added tax, a cascading sales tax and a manufacturers' sales tax. The retail sales tax is shown to be equivalent to a value added tax. In order to produce equal...

The editors of the Mirrlees Review asked us to evaluate the UK VAT and the European Union VAT Directive and compare them to the New Zealand VAT model, which is called GST (Goods and Services Tax). At first sight, this brief might seem strange. After all, the VAT is a European invention that has...

Every year over 20 states offer sales tax holidays (STHs) on specific items like clothes, shoes and other items to encourage consumption, effecting over 100 million consumers. We use a unique dataset of credit cards transaction to study the spending response to these holidays. Using a...

We examine voter support in 2008 for Constitutional Amendment 1 in Florida, which modifies a Proposition 13–like property assessment growth cap by allowing homeowners to port their exempted value to a new home. Despite claims by amendment proponents that it would lower property taxes, we do...

In a Regression Kink (RK) design with a finite sample, a confounding smooth nonlinear relationship between an assignment variable and an outcome variable around a threshold can be spuriously picked up as a kink and result in a biased estimate. In order to investigate how well RK designs handle...