The philanthropic sector is highly consequential, particularly in the United States, and the most important policies directed toward this sector are tax policies. Yet most economic analysis of the optimal tax treatment of charitable giving is ad hoc, treating it as a subject unto itself. This...

The income tax deduction for charitable contributions is limited to a fraction of reported income. Consequently, some of the contributions by large donors are not deductible in the year of the transfer, if ever deductible at all. Because this limit is typically ignored in the empirical...

What are the determinants of philanthropic and political giving? Are donations to charities and parties driven by the same incentives? In this article, we use new administrative household panel data to quantify empirically the motivations for giving, depending on donors’ characteristics and...

Recent econometric studies of the effect of taxes on charitable giving have called into question the behavioral parameters derived from cross-section models. In particular, these studies imply that taxes affect contributions primarily by influencing their timing, not their long-term levels. The...

This paper studies the effect of income tax progressivity on the disproportionate usage of publicly funded higher education. We develop a rational choice model showing that more progressive tax systems increase poorer households' net fiscal benefit, making their children more likely to attend...

This study measures the effect of an increase in Japan's Value Added Tax rate on the timing of household expenditures and consumption, which do not necessarily coincide. The analysis finds that durable and storable expenditures surged in the month prior to the tax rate increase, fell sharply...

This paper analyzes the effects of an income splitting system on marriage partners. The focus is on the time allocation, on investment in marriage-specific human capital and on the distribution of income within the family. Two insights are discussed in detail. First, the distribution of...