Small communities sometimes increase their local sales tax rate in order to maintain or expand public services. The question addressed here is what is the net effect of changing sales tax rates on revenues from sales taxes? Using both semiparametric and nonparametric regression, we find retail...

Tax enforcement costs constrain the government's ability to observe economic activities, giving rise to hard-to-tax (HTT) markets. In this paper, we develop a Hotelling-type spatial model of sales taxation to analyze the welfare and distributional effects of the existence of HTT transactions. We...

The Minister of Finance, K.M Mani , presented the General Budget 2013 to the State Assembly on March 15, 2013. In his address, he commented on the fiscal performance of the State in 2012-13 and laid out his budget proposals for 2013-14. This document presents a brief analysis covering important...

In this paper new evidence is presented of cross-border shopping in response to sales taxation. While several instructive studies provide estimates of the cross-border shopping effect, a unique opportunity is utilized to evaluate the effect of a large discrete change in sales tax policy. Using...

We test the equivalence of tax-inclusive and tax-exclusive prices through a series of experiments that differ only in their handling of the tax. Subjects receive a cash budget and decide how much to keep and how much to spend on various attractively priced goods. Subjects spend significantly...