Measuring the size of government is not simple. Standard measures omit important aspects of government action such as the many deductions, credits, and other tax preferences used to influence resource allocation. We argue that many tax preferences are effectively spending. Traditional measures...

When consumers have questions about companies' services and products, whether medical insurance, airline tickets or home appliances, they almost always encounter automated agents and other forms of customer service technology. Increasingly, tax authorities have begun to offer online...

This paper provides an overview of the relation between tax policy and gender equality, covering labor, capital and wealth, as well as consumption taxes. It considers implicit and explicit gender biases and corrective taxation. On labor taxes, we discuss the well-established findings on female...

To the political economist, the variety of observed forms of taxation presents an interesting research challenge and raises a number of important questions. Can the seemingly confusing array of data be classified in a meaningful way? Is it possible to explain both differences and similarities in...

Tax expenditure analysis (TEA) requires a baseline for identifying tax provisions that provide subsidies or incentives instead of serving to define the tax base and to implement the tax. With respect to the federal income tax, the baseline historically has been the Schanz-Haig-Simons (SHS)...

In 1982 Congress legislated a tax subsidy incentivizing the use of structured settlements. Since then the structured settlement has become a common conclusion for personal injury claims. Perhaps to the detriment of plaintiffs, it became clear early on that defendants and their liability insurers...

Structured settlements have been subsidized by federal, state, and local taxes for nearly three decades. The subsidy, which comes in the form of a tax exclusion that encourages personal injury claimants to forgo a lump sum settlement in favor of long-term periodic payments, is premised upon the...

The semi-dual income tax typically combines a progressive tax schedule for labour and pension income with low and often flat and differentiated nominal tax rates on some forms of capital income. This paper discusses the rationale for the adoption of semi-dual income tax in the taxation of...

There is a rising share of individuals spending at least some part of their working life abroad and acquiring pension rights. While the portability of pensions and other social benefits has received some analytical attention over the recent decade there is currently limited analytical guidance...

Specialized theoretical and empirical research should in principle be embedded in a unified framework that identifies the relevant interactions among different phenomena, enables an appropriate matching of policy instruments to objectives, and grounds normative analysis in individuals' utilities...