In this paper, we employ a unique tax experiment and dataset in a highly salient tax rate environment to examine consumer response to complex and uncertain tax reforms. Tax reforms raise some fundamental questions in public finance: How does consumption respond to tax change? How is the tax...

Fiscal policy in the U.S. and other countries renders intertemporal budgets non-differentiable, nonconvex, and discontinuous. Consequently, assessing work and saving responses to policy requires global optimization. This paper develops the Global Life-Cycle Optimizer (GLO), a stochastic...

Every year many states offer sales tax holidays (STHs) temporarily exempting items like clothes, shoes and school supplies from the state sales tax. We use two data sets, the Diary portion of the Consumer Expenditure Survey and a unique data set of credit cards transactions, to investigate the...

Remote seller state sales and use tax collection and compliance is a significant and increasing economic issue for state and local jurisdictions, especially given the impact on interstate commerce and Congress' Commerce Clause authority to regulate in that area. In this article, author Thomas...

This paper uses recent data for single-family home purchases to study the effects of the German real estate transfer tax. We aim to separate the tax’s short-term anticipatory effects from its long-term effects on real estate transactions. The data indicate that an increase in the transfer tax...

In a model where individuals differ in both their health care needs and their lifestyle preferences, we examine the fair provision of health care when those who regret their initial decisions are granted a fresh start. By considering that each agent chooses how to allocate a given amount of...

Healthy food choices are a canonical example used to illustrate the importance of time preferences in behavioral economics. However, the literature lacks a direct demonstration that they are well-predicted by incentivized time preference measures. We offer direct evidence by combining a novel,...

Excise duties are an important source of government revenue and their rates change relatively often in the Czech Republic. Reforms of excise duties change the prices of goods, a change to which households respond by adjusting their expenditures. I use detailed Czech Statistical Office data and...

The rates of value added tax (VAT) have recently changed in the Czech Republic, and I simulate the impact of these reforms. They are an example of changes in indirect taxes that change the prices of goods and services, to which households can respond by adjusting their expenditures. I first...