We study the effect of alcohol excise taxes on alcohol‐related fatal traffic crashes by examining two large increases in excise taxes in Illinois that occurred in 1999 and in 2009. Using the synthetic control method, we do not find evidence that the tax increases led to a long‐term reduction...

What we eat and drink can cause obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and other conditions. In response, many governments have enacted or are considering taxes on unhealthy food and drinks. This report evaluates the rationale behind such taxes; reviews evidence on their effects; analyzes different...

In this paper we examine the effect of the income tax on charitable giving. An important challenge in this literature has been to estimate the long-run response of giving to a persistent change in tax-price, which can be difficult to distinguish from intertemporal substitution arising from...

There is a long standing interest in the question of whether or not low income households face the same prices as households with higher incomes. If low income households face lower or higher prices than high income households, then income inequality may be greater or lesser than is suggested by...

For most indexes in the Consumer Price Index (CPI), the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) uses a form of the matched-model approach. It has long been recognized that the matched-model method can underestimate quality improvement, and therefore overestimate price inflation, for products exhibiting...

This paper updates a review conducted by CBO in 1996 in which the agency evaluated the academic research on the effects of changes in after-tax wages on labor supply in the U.S. economy. That review concluded that substitution elasticities were larger in absolute value than income elasticities...

This study uses a large panel of tax returns from 1999 to 2008 to investigate how taxes affect the decision to realize gains. The study distinguishes the persistent effect of tax changes from the transitory effect. Similar to earlier studies in the literature, we use the generalized Tobit model...

Recent years have seen tremendous changes in tax law. For example, the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 (EGTRRA 2001) phases out the estate tax over 10 years until it is fully repealed in 2010. Those changes reduce federal revenues but also alter various incentives. For...

Labor supply elasticities are often used to evaluate the effect of changes in tax rates on the total hours worked in the economy. Historically, married women have tended to have larger labor supply elasticities than their spouses because they were the secondary earners in a couple. However,...

We measure the response of household spending to the economic stimulus payments (ESPs) disbursed in mid-2008, using special questions added to the Consumer Expenditure Survey and variation arising from the randomized timing of when the payments were disbursed. We find that, on average,...