This essay argues that the current COVID-19 crisis is the perfect time to make revenue-raising reforms to state corporate income taxes — reforms that would have been desirable policy improvements even during an economic upturn, but that are even more clearly good policy moves in light of the...

This is the second of a series of essays wherein we analyze the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in South Dakota v. Wayfair. In this essay, we address issues related to sales tax formalism and income tax nexus

A centerpiece of the 2017 federal tax legislation's reforms to international corporate income tax rules is the new global intangible low-taxed income regime (or GILTI). In a prior essay, we argued that U.S. state governments should conform to GILTI. But might there be constitutional restrictions...

States and localities offer businesses an enormous amount of tax incentives to locate within their jurisdictions despite: 1) the mass of evidence that suggests that these incentives are not particularly effective and, 2) substantial doubts about their constitutionality. In this essay, we develop...

This essay evaluates the limits on the U.S. federal government's powers to restrict the taxing powers of state governments. The essay revisits earlier debates on this question, to consider the implications of the Supreme Court's decision in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius...

Governments at all levels – federal, state and local – are suffering through ever more severe budget crises. The interests of these different levels of government are often assumed to be in conflict. For instance, it seems reasonable to believe that if the federal government were to get its...

This essay reports revised estimates for the tax cannibalization problem with respect to U.S. state-level corporate income taxes. The essay concludes that, although the tax cannibalization generated by state corporate income taxes has been substantially reduced since 2017, the magnitude of the...

This essay explains some of the implementation details and options for how states might go about expanding their sales tax bases to include services as a response to the fiscal challenges of the COVID-19 crisis